


belomancy

by erzi



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: Blood and Injury, M/M, Manga Spoilers, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:00:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25520236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erzi/pseuds/erzi
Summary: Even less reliable than superstitions are divinations. An exorcist requires innate strength, but their success is a matter of memorized knowledge and its use. Actions, consequences. Fortune-telling exists in the ambiguity of youkai themselves. Signs must be interpreted, metaphors parsed, exact conditions met. Asking a dozen people for one's fortune would result in a dozen variations, and when the fortune came to be, each fortune-teller would find ways to bend their own words to suit what had happened. It's the supernatural for fools, romanticists, or both.I wonder what that makes me, Seiji thinks, hands folded inside his kimono, eye falling off irrelevant scrolls in the family library.
Relationships: Matoba Seiji/Natori Shuuichi
Comments: 17
Kudos: 59
Collections: Natsume Yuujinchou Bang Summer 2k20





	belomancy

**Author's Note:**

> for the natsume yuujinchou 2020 summer big bang! in collaboration w/ hags [[twt: artbyhags](https://twitter.com/artbyhags), [ao3: slimeandflamingos]](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slimeandflamingos), whose art is embedded!!! but if u wanna rt, and u should, here it is on [twt](https://twitter.com/artbyhags/status/1295766395163226114) and on [tumblr](https://slimeandflamingos.tumblr.com/post/626806311781367810/my-half-of-the-natsuyuubang-collaboration-with)

The exorcism had gone so well it had been boring.

The call to the Matoba manor had been frantic, the speaker's voice shrill despite their distance, speaking of an evil and money to vanquish it so great that the call had made its way to Seiji himself one increasingly more important person at a time. For what their benefactor had whispered of, as if afraid the youkai would hear of its imminent contracted death, Seiji had expected a formidable foe. He had slung on his bow and led the Matoba procession to their waiting cars, modernity in the unchanging war his ancestors had waged in sacred weapons and chants, off to either kill or subjugate.

Instead, the youkai had been no stronger than the lowly ones abundant in every forest. Perhaps the clan had been overprepared. Perhaps there are no longer any worthy servants to be had. Perhaps the people that live in these simple towns, slices of nowhere the same across the countryside, have forgotten what it is like to fear that not of this world, and what it is like to rely on the powerful few for protection and wisdom.

 _A little of everything,_ Seiji thinks, not a drop of sweat on him as he offers their benefactor a bland smile, accepting the remaining part of the payment. At least the reward is good. Too much, if anything, for the trifle the clan has done. 

He says nothing of it. It is the benefactor's own fault for forgetting their history, their folklore, their roots.

The drive here had been long. Though the scenery is not dissimilar to home—with mountains uncaring for ordinary matters at their feet, and trees sprouted before the country had a name, and people almost as old as the trees all who are left here—it is a different place, with its own variations of what Seiji knows. He tells the clan they will stay the night, driving back in the morning.

The town's single inn will house them as neatly as their shoes, filed dutifully in queues as they walk in, Seiji last, lingering to admire his people. There is his own strength, nestled in bone and blood; and there is his clan's strength but words away from his command—

The sound of cloth tearing, rippling the peace; a stumble in Seiji's step, foot unrestrained, because his geta has broken.

He frowns down at it. It's an inconvenience, but the sight of the cloth torn off and the burden of his duty, entangled with the unnatural, whisper a reminder in his ear: that there is misfortune in a broken geta.

And enough misfortune already drags the Matoba name. What's more to do to him? It doesn't retract from his obligations; it sustains them, if anything. 

He removes both of the geta, though he keeps the broken one. It can be repaired, and it would do him no good to leave the inn with a flimsy shoe. He straightens. Resumes his entrance to the inn. 

In the privacy of his rented room, the head of the Matoba clan—feared by his prey as much as fellow predators; with a youth that put sneers into his doubters' faces, who learned to bow their heads in submission remembering how the young hunger for blood—becomes just Seiji.

First the bow is taken off, reverently, offered to no god but himself. The bag of arrows goes beside it. Next is his clothing. As fastidiously as each layer had been wrapped or tied or pulled over, in reverse they come off—meticulously, a ritual. They are folded, exchanged for the inn's looser wear, a summer night's garments, smelling of a fresh wash and the subtleties of the unpopulated countryside. Last is the tie that keeps his hair together, undone with a skilled hand, hair falling midway down his back. 

He should take a bath. These kinds of places boast the best of them, with water sweet from streams, and a forest's nightlife chirping through the gap passing for a window on the wooden walls. He thumbs a strand of his hair, flecked with dust fallen from the house the youkai had besieged. Yes, he needs a bath. 

He seeks out the innkeeper, who bows with greater obeisance than some exorcists show him. So stooped is he that he stays half-bent on the walk to show Seiji where the baths are. The innkeeper's head stays bowed as he leaves Seiji a towel, sponge, and soap, but the inn is not so luxurious as to have hair oils. Plain water will have to do.

Even in coming here he has kept the eyepatch on. There is never rest from the generations-long hunt of his family. To be sure, the youkai is punctual in its haunting, but to become complacent with that idea is to lose. 

Seiji is careful in stepping in the bath, always with his head firmly up to keep the eyepatch dry. The water is soft and warm as an embrace, gently opening up for him. His hair streams out, dark color darkest yet with the water hungrily seeping into it, dragging it down the barest breadth beneath the surface. He dips his head back, allowing the hair there hydration as well, and so begins this other ritual of fingers undoing knots, separating hair strands, nourishing them had he anything to do so with. At home, he'll have to tend to it; water is good only for so long.

The head of the Matoba clan, sharper in his actions than his already-barbed words, fussing over his hair, he idly self-observes, distant from his own self, a smirk on his face. 

How long has he been growing out his hair? Years now. All for the prospect of a deal with a youkai. It had become impossible to ignore the weight of his ever-growing hair, letting it do as it pleased and getting only unruliness, and so Seiji had taken to caring for it. In bettering his hair, he too bettered the chances it would be accepted by a youkai. What he does is not from vanity; he is not Shuuichi—

His fingers still halfway through his hair, an expression too flat to be unintentional smoothing over his face. 

He resumes his combing, mind draining itself of any thought but of being himself here, with nothing of the past to bind him. Just a present, empty of anything that will not strengthen the Matoba name.

Soon his hair is fine as he can get it, given the circumstances. Then his body is cleansed of the day's grime and perhaps something older than that. He rests in the water, head reclined to the wall, listening to the forest's earthly creatures call out for companionship or simply to announce that they exist.

There is tightness at his mouth, inexplicable until the answer reveals itself: he hasn't washed his face yet. Yes, it's that. 

Here is where Seiji concedes— not a loss, it's too small for that. A temporary truce. As he dries his hands on the towel and unties the eyepatch with the attention that would be given to the divine, setting aside this paper thinness he must rely on for protection, he acknowledges a truce at his own vulnerability. But it is temporary. Always. He splashes water on his face, rubs small circles down it, smoothness singularly upset by the jagged shape raised across his right eye. The water runs in tiny rivulets or else it stays stubbornly at his jaw, but all of it is dried off with the towel's firm patting. Seiji ties the eyepatch back on, face dry, yet how the thing clings to the contours of his eye socket, wanting to be a second skin. 

He steps out of the bath, drying the rest of his body, slipping back into his clothes. As quietly as he'd come in, he goes, leaving no mark at all that he had been in the bath.

The moon tonight does not appear to exist, and in the room's dim lantern light, Seiji mends the geta with a knot. Crude, but it will serve him. That's all he needs of his things: use. He glances at his bow and arrows, passive, lying flat. Absently he presses the crisp edge of his eyepatch between thumb and forefinger; realizing it, he drops his hand, a tiny, shallow slash on the pad of his thumb prickling red.

He lets it bleed. It's shallow and painless enough there's no use in trying to clean it. He lies down on the futon, is uncomfortable with the tatami it is spread over, and fixes the futon's direction. He pulls up the bed sheets. Under his thumb, a small smear of blood forms. 

Through the window, the North Star keeps its white gaze on his head, and a spider trailing a silk path down from the neglected ceiling has a sleeping Matoba Seiji repeated four-fold, twice, on its eyes. 

* * *

A crow caws, is answered by one of its brethren once, then by another and _another_ and a whole murder of them raise their ruckus, and so Seiji wakes. 

For him, this is a late hour; it's unusual he sleeps longer than the sun. He dresses and gathers his things. He'd not given an exact time for the clan's departure, but it won't do to be the last to arrive.

Unfortunately, he is, but his upbringing places perfect blankness on his face. Upon his entrance, the early-morning murmurs of his people, wondering where their leader is, musing about the dullness of their task, are immediately silenced.

Nanase, of course, is the one who approaches him. "You—" she starts, and cuts herself off, her expression of steel for a moment denting. Her recovery is so quick Seiji thinks he imagined the change. "Are we good to go?"

"Yes," he answers simply, walking to the front of the group, ignoring the mild discomfort in his foot from the geta's poor knot. His people follow. 

His arrows clack faintly against his back, secure in their bag, as is the bow, wrapped so thoroughly he does not feel its slim shape. 

What he feels is Nanase staring, acutely as a dagger, at his back. 

He cranes his head over his shoulder. "Have you something to tell me, Nanase?"

"Not now," she says, in a voice only he can hear.

His jaw sets. Nanase speaks as she will wherever. If she won't, something is wrong.

It is when they slide into their car, after Nanase closes the partition between the driver and themselves, and not before she glances back to the retreating inn with eyebrows warily drawn together, that she says, "Did something happen to you in the inn?"

It is Seiji who frowns now. "Nanase, that is vague enough to mean nothing." 

"I sense misfortune on you. A lot of it."

The corner of his mouth lifts. "How heartwarming for a woman who shares not a drop of my blood to be concerned for me."

"It reminds me," she says, not a single crack in her voice, "of when your mother died."

That gives him pause.

"This isn't the usual target painted on your back from the family's curse or the clans that would bring you down," she continues. "It wasn't there yesterday. So, something happened to you in the inn."

"I only bathed before I slept," he says, and then remembers the night's broken geta, the morning's crows. Everyday occurrences, dull enough to be forgettable. And superstitions still.

Despite the supernatural that teems in his life, Seiji has never much heeded superstitions. He can accept the reality of a creature neither human nor animal, neither alive nor dead; he confronts them, he can kill them: actions with immediate consequences. Superstitions call for possibilities that could occur at any time in the future, and thus have been caused by anything at all, by things more real and impactful than a broken shoe or a bird's ugly call.

But if Nanase says something hostile clings to him, and she says so after these things have happened, then there could be truth to the superstitions.

It could have been something else entirely. Would it have escaped his notice, though? His power is greater than Nanase's, and he did not sense ill omens yesterday or even today, as she tells him something is not well with him. There is no one else with power or acquaintanceship high enough he can ask ( _But there is_ , a traitorous voice mimicking his own lilts, putting the scent of loquats sweet on his nose). So he will have to trust her—not that he thinks Nanase a feeble exorcist, but just one person who is not himself saying something does not give him cause for firm belief.

He turns to the car's window, the trees and mountains and sky indeterminable smears of colors. The roads are not smooth out here, and the arrows bagged on his lap clatter like old women. His eye drifts to them.

There is no one else he can ask (there is not, there is not). There is some _thing_ he can turn to.

* * *

Even less reliable than superstitions are divinations. An exorcist requires innate strength, but their success is a matter of memorized knowledge and its use. Actions, consequences. Fortune-telling exists in the ambiguity of youkai themselves. Signs must be interpreted, metaphors parsed, exact conditions met. Asking a dozen people for one's fortune would result in a dozen variations, and when the fortune came to be, each fortune-teller would find ways to bend their own words to suit what had happened. It's the supernatural for fools, romanticists, or both.

 _I wonder what that makes me_ , Seiji thinks, hands folded inside his kimono, eye falling off irrelevant scrolls in the family library.

For its fickleness, divination is rarely in an exorcist's skill set. The Matoba clan wrinkles its nose at it; Seiji's upbringing did not entail peering at the remains in the bottom of his tea to glean fate. But the Matoba clan hoards all knowledge with greed. If they do not use it, no one should. Somewhere along the dusty hallways must be a divination Seiji can read about, learn, do.

Divinations are not always reliable, but a _sometimes_ exists in that definition. And there are different ways of telling fortunes. Something without pictorial interpretations, archaic prose, conditional particularity. It has to exist.

Seiji unshelves any scroll that could possibly be of help. There aren't many; the divination scrolls the family has accrued are precisely those most useless. Tea leaves, bone fragments, cards. No messages clear in them except what the viewer wishes to see. Nothing concise and straight like—

Arrows. Seiji stands before the belomancy scroll. An art less practiced, ignored for the perfection of an arrow aimed to kill, not divine. Certainly that's where his skill is. But if he can shoot for another's death, he can shoot to predict his own life's undertaking.

He takes the scroll. 

At night, in his room, finding refuge in candles, he reads. The scroll is thin, but the words are written small and packed, like the paper is a precious resource not to be wasted. The content is just as dense in its information; these are words not written or spoken in three centuries, at the least. If the divination is as tedious as the reading is, he'll have to turn to another method.

With each character deciphered, the meaning as a whole takes form, and though the scribe speaks with a lovestruck veneration that disgusts Seiji, he can see why they had thought what they did. More importantly, he learns what he must do. 

He puts the finished scroll down an hour later, ignorant of the lateness in the hour, to prepare.

* * *

A moonless night, arrows carved from sacred sakaki wood, bamboo beaten to thinness and stretched over the round shape of a target, eyes upon eyes drawn with a dark mixture of pine soot ink and Seiji's own blood, a silk blindfold and an archer's uniform half-draped across the chest both black as the night. And unseen, but forefront in Seiji's mind, the questions he'll drag out of fate. 

If anyone wondered why the Matoba clan leader had spent a night hunting down these things, they hadn't voiced it. They would have been fools to. Though they could have answered it themselves: Matoba Seiji is known for eccentricities. That would have sufficed, to the typical clan member.

Not for Nanase. Seiji had not seen her, but word could reach her. She would arrive closest to the truth. 

Depending on what the arrows say, he'll confirm her suspicions. For all the preparations, for all the strength Seiji indubitably possesses, this is still divination. His movements are drawn out, languid, with haughty skepticism. He will shoot, because it is embedded into his sinew, and if shooting a divining arrow results in only an arrow being shot, he won't be surprised.

He empties his lungs, steadily. Looks where the target not painted on him but of him should be, but he sees nothing: the dark and the distance hide it. Which is the reason for divining in a new moon's domain, the scroll had said. Ask the arrow a yes-or-no question, shoot as your heart tells, find the answer in where it meets its mark: _yes_ will land on the pale bamboo, _no_ will hit the blood-ink. That no arrows will miss when pointed blinded by nature and the self is the claim for its veracity; were it ordinary archery, the arrows would fly poorly. Because fate is being tested, it will answer. So the scroll says.

He ties the blindfold deftly, fingers practiced from tying the patch around his scarred eye. The darkness becomes absolute; opening his eyes is no different than closing them. It is uncomfortable to have his right one open and feel the silk—the slight scratch of paper he is accustomed to, but the silk is too soft—and so he closes them, blindly reaching back for an arrow. He didn't think he'd fumble in grabbing one, simple as the action is, constant as he has repeated it in his practices, but he does. They slither from his fingers, crowding away from him, as if knowing what will happen to them and not wanting to meet it. He catches one, finally, notching it with more firmness than he tends to use. In the night he stands motionless, just one of thousands of shadows, a silhouette that could grace an ancient archery scroll.

Speech lessons were part of Seiji's upbringing, but as he speaks, his tongue is too large for his own mouth: "Does something other than the Matoba youkai presently haunt me?"

The bow has been sanded to smoothness, but as soon as he poses the question, he thinks he can feel the wood's grain burn into the grooves of his finger pads. And with neither effort nor thought, he lets the arrow go, the thrum flying past his ear, and he is robbed of the satisfaction of a mark well-met: the sound exists, then it doesn't. 

There are more questions to ask. The arrows will allow a total of four, the sound of death following even into divination. The rest of his questions depend on the answers to the previous, and so he undoes the blindfold to walk across the green to the target. The grass is pliant underfoot, whispering what could pass for words at this hour of the night, without any moon to watch over mundanity's occurrence. 

Harsh, black outlines are defined as trees—these are the grounds he knows. And now the thing he doesn't. With a flick of his wrist and a command to burn, a strip of charmed paper crackles ungodly blue. The light is feeble but it is enough to see the arrow has struck the bamboo perfectly at its top. The first question, the first answer. Yes, something other than the Matoba creature that has been inherited in mockery of an heirloom haunts him. Nanase had been correct about the thickness that hangs around him, and all others were too weak or else too afraid to speak of it.

There will be time to be displeased at his people later. Right now, he feels something akin to worry. It's mild, vaguer than the shadows around him, but still there.

He murmurs the charm to ashes, returns to the awning, redoes the blindfold, and takes the second arrow. The wood seems to press back onto him as he asks, "Is this haunting fatal to me?" Off the arrow goes, a deeper hum that resounds in his bones, rattling in the tautness of his outstretched arm.

The youkai after his eye will not kill him—it's a persistent creature, dull even without the might of a clan that has predicted it. Fending it off is a ritual just as the proper pouring of tea, the notching and loosing of an arrow, the incense fragrant at the foot of the ancestors' shrine. It's an annoyance, an intricate show of power to other exorcists ( _look, strangers, how the Matoba could kill it, but won't, to remind you all of what we could do if we so wished_ ) but not a threat.

This new thing on him will kill him, so the arrow says, falling in a blue-lit queue below the first arrow, in the next slot of unmarred bamboo. The head digs into the target deep enough that none of it is glimpsed, as if the target, remembering the bamboo that comprises it, grew a shoot feathered rather than leaved. Not so much as a breeze breathes through this summer night—the stillness is as absolute as the dark; it is its sweet sister—and so the feathers stay impossibly put. Seiji stares, disbelieving of the utter motionlessness and where the arrow has landed.

Because of all the title of Matoba clan head implies, plans are made for each head's untimely death the moment they are crowned. Stronger youkai would have their blood if they could; jealous, bitter exorcists continue to try to fell the clan; the weight of an ancient family and all the expectations past and future are tethered to the clan head and grow uncontrollably by the day. Seiji had been primed for ascension before he understood what such lessons were for, and his succession had been smooth for it, as it had been for all previous leaders before him.

There is presently no Matoba heir. It had loomed in Seiji's future, a far-off thing to neglect until someone greater than himself forced him to acknowledge it. There are plans for a communal rule should the head be unavailable, but it's nothing permanent. He had never thought that seriously about the future—it was too _personal_ , too close to the muscle he has built up around his heart—and he had never considered it an issue. But with an arrow telling him otherwise, he recognizes how foolish that had been. Even he is mortal; his time would have inevitably come. What he has now—fortunately, unfortunately—is an answer to what it will be. A thing of the unnatural, picked up without his realizing. Pathetic.

But it could be years from now, with whatever clings to him festered to its most putrid infection. There could be time to finalize how the Matoba clan will continue.

Back under the awning, ignoring the tension in his hands as he blindfolds himself again and as he notches an arrow, he speaks: "Will this kill me within a week?" If it will take longer than that, he can prepare properly. If it's within a week, there is cause to worry.

He lets the arrow go hesitantly, its shape burned onto his fingers from the tightness he'd held it with. He hesitates for an additional moment before taking off the blindfold, shuffling across the eternal black to the target, and it grants him insolence like what he duly gives with every so-called smile, because the arrow is lodged heartily into the next sequence of bamboo. The blood he'd given, unused; the blood still in him, cold.

When given the sentence of their death, other people would immediately think of all they'd left undone: the _somedays_ pushed to a day as unthinkable as it is unlivable. It threatens to break into Seiji's mind, but he flings it with detachment, compartmentalization in place. The clan is first.

Most people will rank up to fill important positions. In the absence of an heir, he will name Nanase as interim head, until the next Matoba, distant as they may be, is prepared or comes of age. Whichever is first. 

An image wedges itself, unbidden, in his mind: a face resembling his own, rounded to contrast his sharpness—though not in the smile, made more menacing by the deceiving softness in the feminine features. A face resembling his own but born in the wrong body for this world, and thus cast aside.

Even as children Seiji and his sister had stood on opposite sides of a fault line. As each they grew into their place in the exorcists' world, the fault line could not bear their combined weight, different in origin but heavy all the same, and it had fully split. One Matoba immersed in his duty, the other abandoning it as if she ever had a choice. The clan has let her exist in her outspoken antagonism and eccentricities because that's all they are—harsh words. Surely she would not want her brother dead; it isn't as if she, a woman powerless by gender and innate inability, could declare leadership of the clan. 

She couldn't, but someone in her favor could.

His vision shifts, and he sees the arrow, splitting the bamboo and the black of night. What is truly here, not paranoia on par with what plagued his father prior to his demise, and probably every former clan head. To be the Matoba's leader is to take the hatred of others with it. But maybe this time it isn't baseless. All he needs to do—with the last question—is ask. Knowing the _what_ and the _when_ will matter more if he knows the _who_.

His kimono does not flutter as he swivels on his heel, sweeping over the grass, stepping onto the firmness of the porch's wood, feeling the silk renewed tightly to his eyes. These are real. Like his voice, freezing the summer air around him, as he orders the arrow to answer him: "Can I trust my family?"

Off the arrow goes, sounding like a cackle as it twangs from the arrow, as it cuts the air. Then nothing. 

A journey to the target, the distance never seeming to shrink, but after he finishes eternity to come to the target, he finds that it is struck through with three arrows. The ones he has already read. Because the fourth has dug into the ground, a single stiffness rising from the swaying grass. Seiji rounds it, incredulous that the arrow missed the target. 

That isn't supposed to happen. This possibility was not in the scroll at all, and there are too many things that could be the failure's cause. Has he erred in the particular conditions for fortune-telling? No; the rest fell true, and he'd done nothing differently. Had he misread; were only three questions allowed? No, the characters for the numbers are distinguishable—besides, the number four is beloved by these fortunes, trifling with what should not be trifled with. 

Had it been the question itself? The arrow had not given a yes or no. Maybe it couldn't, with what it had been given. How is trust defined for someone like Seiji, taught that faith is just a word except when leveled at the self with strength to back it? Or family, when the fullest-blooded Matoba is absent from his life, and those with watered blood are leeches wanting him and his power, and the people that make up his everyday are at their cores strangers plucked from all over the nation for their skill?

It does not matter now. He is out of questions. He removes the arrows from the target like they're splinters stuck through his skin. The bamboo they have torn flutters, the gashes they have made exposed uncaringly. The arrows go into the bag against his back; the blindfold is folded into one of his sleeve pockets. The target's bamboo face is bundled up; with a paper talisman pressed to it, and the right words said, it bursts into blue flames, burning the answers to ashes while his hands are left unharmed. The cold in them is all him.

He has seven days to finish what should have taken up a lifetime. Less than that, possibly; if in four days his fate is executed, he wouldn't be too surprised. There is no time to rest.

The last of the ashes fall from his hands, and he strides into the manor with the grace of an emperor whose reign crumbles before him, but never his will. 

There are things to do.

* * *

Seiji hides sleeplessness poorly. The dark crescents under his eyes together form a new moon, last night's witness to his condemnation. No one would think anything of the head of the clan staying past the late hours; his duty never slept. No one except the person within his ranks, who may or may not exist, who may or may not have instigated his death.

At the least, the culprit is not Nanase.

There is no proof in it. Just his own instinct, paired with logic. Nanase has power, but she is content as an assistant, ranked and esteemed highly without the crux of leading them all. She is no Matoba by birth. Nor a man. She could not rise further.

Unless a Matoba clan head willed it so.

The sliding door to his study opens up, and Nanase in her gray hair and gray clothes is framed by the hallway wall in neutral wood.

"You asked to see me?" she says after raising herself from a brisk, though respectful, bow.

"Yes. Come in."

A _click_ confirms the door's closing, the hallway's muted colors cut off, the paper door behind Nanase all in sight. She walks slowly toward his low desk. Unusual for her; her movements are as sharp and quick as her words. She's pulled her eyebrows together minutely; it couldn't be called a frown, but on her emotionally impassive self, it's a sign she thinks something's up.

As usual, she's right.

She folds her knees under her, sitting in front of the desk. She's perhaps the only person in the clan unafraid to meet his gaze, and she has held it throughout her entrance. "You didn't sleep," she says. "And I heard murmurings of you gathering items for a late-night archery practice." She doesn't directly ask if it is related—it would be uncouth to question her leader—but from the way she voices these casual observations, she might as well have.

It doesn't bother Seiji. This is their rapport. His lip quirks up. 

Now Nanase's eyebrows go up. 

Seiji, too, doesn't need to use words for her to understand. In his gesture, a smile if one was being generous or foolish, was the answer. Yes, he hadn't slept; yes, he'd been in the archery range. What remains unasked and unanswered is why.

"Exorcists love gossip more than housewives do," he idly says, filing up the papers he'd been writing, lest Nanase read them. But he wants her to see that movement, to know he has forbidden her from something else.

She'd noticed the motion, of course. "That's as far as the gossip went."

"Then I hid myself and my motives properly."

"Did you want me here just to gloat that accomplishment, and to make an obvious show of hiding something?" she asks. "You're being too sly. This conversation is more like one you'd have with the Natori boy."

His nails scrape the paper beneath him as he curls his fingers in. He thinks he can feel each individual fiber come undone; he thinks he can smell the dust motes float off the paper as if he's pressed a book to his nose—a dusty book, rotting in a library, held by a boy with hair just as frayed as the paper Seiji has just torn. As frayed as what had become of the boy, grown now, and himself.

(Later. That will be— taken care of later.)

Seiji fixes his posture. If Nanase won't abide his winding maneuvers, then so be it. "Nanase, I was finishing up my will."

"Your will?"

He pushes a paper to her. She leans forward to read it, squinting, like Seiji had made an uncharacteristic joke she has to verify. Verify she does. The will's wording leaves no misconceptions of what it is.

"And why were you working on this?" she asks, looking up at him. "The clan has protocols written should something happen to you, but nothing this detailed. You're a little too young to be doing this, aren't you?"

"I was at the archery range to perform belomancy, since you felt something on me, and I wanted to confirm what it was." He folds his hands into the other arm's sleeve and affects what not even a generous fool would deem a smile. "I have confirmed what it was and more. Nanase, I am going to die within a week. You are to be the interim clan head until another in my family proves strong enough." 

Her eyebrows fall flat, but not as flat as her mouth. 

"The closer to the Matoba bloodline they are, the better," he continues, "but given how my family has... split, I don't know how long it will take to find the next heir. You will lead the clan just fine until that happens." He shuffles another paper over. "People will be promoted. I trust you'll honor my judgment and memory. You're quite acquainted with the bureaucratic aspect of the clan, but I am preparing information to make the transition easier. As well as proof I have truly allowed a non-Matoba woman to be the head."

Nanase straightens, eyes level on Seiji's, knowing this isn't one of his whimsies. "Why are you telling me alone," she says, expectedly emotionless, "rather than with all the clan elders?"

"Because I cannot trust anyone else in the clan." He takes his hands from his sleeves, directing an unfinished scroll to him, dipping a brush into ink. "Neither should you."

"Is that you talking or whatever the arrows said?"

Another maybe-smile. 

He shortens last night's events to just the fortune. Nanase's face does not change after he's done speaking. 

"This is going to be a disaster," she says.

"Oh, without a doubt. But it won't be my problem soon enough."

She smiles, deprecating for them both. "You're awfully calm about it."

"We all die," he says, light as a summer breeze. "My time has simply come sooner. And with warning. There is good in that; I've time to prepare for what I will not finish."

"Assuming you have the full week to do everything."

"My," he says, ink bleeding on the page from the point where the brush remains, "how optimistic of you. Thank you."

Silence settles itself between them. It isn't comfortable, but neither is it uncomfortable: it is just the kind of silence where there is nothing next to be said. Nothing right.

"You're sure," Nanase says, hesitant, like the words are getting pulled out of her, "that this is where you want to be?"

He puts the brush down with a crisp _clack_ , snapping his head up. "Whatever do you mean by that, Nanase?" he asks, in amiability laced falsely. It's the voice he reserves for people who do not understand him. He can't remember ever using it with Nanase; he'd not made a conscious effort to use it now. It's what had come on its own, a natural defense to the thing Nanase still won't ask.

To her credit, she does not flinch. "You're going to die and you're spending it writing how-tos."

And he trades the sweetness for stone. "I am still the head of the Matoba clan. I exist for it. I may soon be gone, but I expect it to continue. It cannot die."

"I won't let it," she replies, evenly. "But you don't want to die with regrets, do you? Or lies?" She tilts her head down, her eyes boring into him over her steel-rimmed glasses. "You care about things other than the clan. You should see to those."

He keeps himself unmoving. Not a twitch to his eye, nor an inward draw to his lips, nor a fist made.

"If you can't trust the clan, are you willing to spend the rest of your time here? Do you want to?"

"It doesn't matter, does it? I cannot avoid fate by changing venues. It will follow me."

"You know I didn't imply it was to avoid fate." 

He does know. He will not display weakness to anyone: not in the height of his power, neither as he falls. And he fails himself by pursing his mouth, though briefly.

She stands. "I think the clan head would have reasons for stepping out for a few days, unexplained." She walks to the door, but pauses, her hand by the handhold. She looks back. "You're a fine leader, Seiji. I'm not a Matoba, but I'll faithfully serve the clan for as long as I live." 

She leaves, not allowing Seiji a reply. Though he does not have one. A _thank you_ for what she's done and will do would be too gentle from him. So he lets her go, and perhaps that's another mistake—letting someone else go. 

But the first mistake of its kind that he'd made will have something of a resolution. Nanase's intuition had not led her astray. She'd been there when Natori Shuuichi had blown in like a strange leaf into the forest hiding the Matoba manor. She'd remained in all that followed. Or failed to.

Seiji doesn't know what he'd do if he went to see Shuuichi. There are no apologies to be made; they are not in him, regardless. There is no help to enlist; fate is fate is fate. The other things he could say—could he really say them? He won't even give them a voice within his own head.

He could, at the least, be the one to tell Shuuichi he will die, rather than have Shuuichi hear it through the rumors exorcists delight in spreading. And when the youngest man to head the Matoba clan dies, those rumors will spread like fire for the truth they will be. 

He shifts away the paper he'd been writing in favor of a small strip of it, retrieved from inside his sleeves. He dips his brush anew into the ink, blackness seeping into it, dripping back into the glass well as he thinks of his message. He must assume it can be read by unintended eyes; he must not say anything that would give Shuuichi cause to run to him in one of his impulses to help.

The message occurs to him swiftly, and he flourishes it on. With a spell recited and a name delivered, the paper crinkles to life and pursues its singular purpose, given with his blessing. 

He brings the other paper over, reading over the business and law jargon. He'd always thought it dull but necessary to do. Now, a flash of irritation: does this matter, in the grand scheme of things? In the imminence of his death?

 _Yes_ , he thinks, frowning, searching for an ink pen. He thinks it, and ignores the dull emptiness where any of his organs should be.

* * *

Seiji is taller than Yorishima's fence now. Just seven years ago, standing directly in front would have his eyes skimming over its flat top, resting on the trees lush in the garden that the fence encloses. He doesn't need to stretch on the tips of his toes to glimpse the house: it is there, reclusive, stately, in the shadows of the fruit-ripened trees. He can reach them now, if he'd like.

But he keeps his hands folded in his sleeves, black as the night hiding from this day, the afternoon sun at its brightest. The neck of his kimono clings to his nape with sweat. Summer is his least favorite season for its heat, humidity, oppression. Of course fate would take it upon itself to have his last breath taste of warm dew.

He breathes in the sweetness of the loquats while he can, closing his eyes, willing a memory away, focusing on his present. Would Shuuichi come? Seiji had not given him an explanation for this unofficial meeting. And over the course of their acquaintanceship, he'd not given him much reason to ever heed any of his callings.

To die without regrets or lies, Nanase had said. What he should have said is that he had none. (What that would have been is a lie itself.)

His name is hissed, like a poorly shared secret. He turns and sees Shuuichi—clad in oversized sunglasses, an ill-fitting jacket, and a hat—cross from the next block over. The paper message is in his hand, and confusion is on his face. No different from how he is whenever they meet.

Seiji's suggestion of a smile is no force of power or dominance. 

"Matoba-san!" Shuuichi says again, less of a whisper now that he's in front of him. "What's the meaning of this?" He flutters the piece of paper, reading from it. "'Tomorrow, when the sun shines highest, meet me where the fruits we tasted grow.' What kind of message is that?!"

"One that works. You came—"

"To see what this was about!" 

"—and in such terrible attire not only for this weather but for what passes as clothing."

The sunglasses' reflected light, mirror-smooth, dances as Shuuichi, tight-lipped, looks Seiji over. "I'm guessing this has to do with that weird presence around you. Are you going to be dragging me into something?" His voice is clear, if wary. "I can't be out long. If this is some scheme of yours, count me out." 

"I'm dying soon, Natori-san," Seiji says, with no warning, as simple as a comment on the unbearable weather.

In the absence of Shuuichi's reply, Seiji notices too the lack of cicadas trilling from trees, or the laughter of children running free. Only a crow, perched on a distant house, breaking the stifling heat with a hollow cry, is the tell of the season.

"That's not funny at all," Shuuichi says, taking off the sunglasses, pocketing them. He's frowning a reprimand, but there is a downturn to his mouth like he wonders why Seiji would say that. "What are really you up to?"

"Nothing." He turns to the trees, regal, dripping sweetest fruit. Except Shuuichi's old share. "I merely wished to tell you myself that I am going to die, within the week." His eye wanders to Shuuichi. "You were owed that much."

"Have you slept? You look tired. You're not thinking of doing anything— _impulsive_ , or stupid, are you?" He stretches his hand out, like he means to grab Seiji's wrist, but he swiftly pulls back. His face is pained, worried. 

_Because he cares?_ Seiji thinks. He clicks his teeth. "No, Natori-san. This is not of my own volition."

"Is this that thing talking, then? Are you possessed?" 

"I am not possessed. Though what ails me is related." He tries on a smile, but he feels it tug insincerely. "Have you time for a walk?"

"Yes, but—" He glances about. "Do you really want to talk about that outside? Is it safe?"

"I asked you here because I knew it would be safe. It is not so at my manor."

Shuuichi is slack-jawed. "Is someone in your clan trying to kill you? We can go to the police or something! Why are you so calm and accepting about dying?! How do you even know it's going to happen?"

"Let's walk," Seiji says, doing so without waiting for Shuuichi. He will totter after.

Seiji gives him a longer version of what he'd told Nanase, as Shuuichi had not known of the exorcism the clan had undertaken elsewhere in the countryside.

Shuuichi tries to say too many things at once, and nothing coherent makes it out. He huffs an exhale and tries again, with the fiercest countenance Seiji has ever seen in him. "You're kidding, right? You're not going to fight it? _You_ —the Matoba clan head—are just willing to die?"

"I cannot go against fate." He brushes away a lock of hair from his eyepatch, its shadow a blight where he keeps his scarred eye open. "No one can."

"But—!"

"There are many things we don't understand about the nature of our work. Only that they are true. Prophecies and fortune-telling are intensive, bothersome things. But when done right, they do not lie." He levels a glare at Shuuichi, only half of it perceivable. "I did it right. I have not been lied to. I cannot defy what my belomancy has foretold any more than I could the passage of time."

"But—"

"There are no 'but's."

"—you're too young!" Shuuichi says, loudly, eyes wide. "You're— you lead— you have— we— you can't _die_." His finish is sputtered, opposite in volume to his outburst, defeat in the downturn of his lip, accepting Seiji's words.

Seiji avoids his gaze. "It's a mercy, is it not? To know it will happen instead of spending my days planning for a future that won't be. Especially for someone like me." Him, Matoba Seiji. Carrying the name of something that for generations has refused to die, that with his every breath he has fought to keep that way. He's always known one of those breaths would one day be the last because a Matoba child's education spared no softness, but it's one thing to know one will die in the distant future, and another to have the meaning of those words be spelled by arrows.

"So that's how you're dealing with it?" Shuuichi says, disdainful and yet hurt. "Telling yourself it's fine to have a death sentence over your head?"

"Because it is. Your emotions are impairing your judgment."

What passes over Shuuichi's face now is all hurt. Like a cloud covering the sun, it is soon obscured, replaced with unconvincingly assumed disinterest, the hurt peeking out where the cloud cannot cover. "Well, I know now. What am I supposed to do?"

"Whatever you like." He thumbs the hem of his sleeve. "I only wanted to tell you."

"That's really all you called me here for?"

Seiji presses the tip of his tongue behind his teeth. Then it settles. He smiles. "It isn't. Perceptive of you."

Shuuichi abruptly stops walking; Seiji has no choice but to stop, too. "What— what else do you need to say, then?"

There is something in his eyes Seiji thinks he recognizes, but he will not name it, will not allow himself to think it could be genuine for what it would mean now and stretching back into all that has made them.

He turns his head away. "As it's possible one of my family members could be who kills me, directly or not, and I want the perpetrator punished, I will need to stay with you until it happens."

"You want me to be a witness to your own death?!"

"Yes." He looks askance at him. "Even I deserve justice."

"I mean, yes, but..."

"But?" he says, turning his head fully, daring Shuuichi to finish his thought.

Shuuichi is focused on his eyepatch, his hidden eye, so he may not endure Seiji's gaze. "I don't want to see you die."

Ah. Seiji hadn't considered Shuuichi's disposition to watch anything not a youkai meet its end. Curtly, he nods to himself. "I see," he says. And nothing more.

"Does anyone else know about this?" Shuuichi asks a moment later, never one for abiding uncomfortable silence.

"Nanase. I suppose she can be my witness," he says, imagining a death where the person beside him is anyone but Shuuichi, and he carefully twines his fingers in front of him, as if to catch his stomach dropping out from under him.

"No, wait!"

The hand Shuuichi had almost offered earlier is forced on him, around his wrist, but not unkindly. 

Seiji glances at it, as if to confirm it is there, that the touch and the slight tug down weren't vividly imagined. And Shuuichi grips him firmer.

"I'll stay with you," he says, unwavering on Seiji's good eye. Except for his hand, which he drops, slowly, as if sudden movements will frighten Seiji away. "If it's certain you're going to die, then someone should be there for you."

Seiji looks at him. Is looked at right back. He quirks a smile. "How gallant of you, Natori-san, but my concern is the perpetrator. That is who you will focus on. Then bring them to justice."

Shuuichi purses his lips. "That's all?" he says, quietly.

"Yes." Seiji idly rubs small circles on the inside of his wrist. "What else did you think I wanted of you?"

"Nothing. I don't know. It doesn't matter." Shuuichi scuffs the pavement with his shoe, as if covering up the contradictions he's just uttered. "We can go home now, if there's nothing else to say."

A home that's not his. A _we_ that is stranger than any ancient enchantment Seiji could ever read.

He nods. No word or phrase seems adequate. Or is willing to come.

* * *

Shuuichi peeks left and right before hurriedly swinging his apartment's door to a close, sliding the lock into place. He tosses his hat, sunglasses, and jacket to the sofa with a small sigh.

"I don't think locks will stop whatever it is that will kill me," Seiji says, standing with crossed arms in front of the living room window, watching the birds on the cars below.

He feels the annoyed look thrown his way. But it's blunt where it could have cut. Then he hears Shuuichi's footsteps, heavier than they tend to be, as he walks up to him.

Shuuichi opens his mouth. Closes it, frowning. Speaks: "If there's nothing we can do to change your fate, is this really where you want to die? My apartment?"

"I don't care where it is. I only need you to note what servant or which admirably bold exorcist is the one who does the deed."

"I'm going to live in a crime scene," Shuuichi grumbles, plopping on the sofa.

"Oh, I don't think this will be a bloody affair." Seiji runs his fingers quickly through his tied-up hair. "It's likely a curse of some sort. Then an exorcist will come confirm it has truly done me in."

Shuuichi springs up. "A curse? Curses can be stopped!"

"This is merely conjecture, Natori-san." He tilts his head, curious like a cat. "I cannot sense it myself, but is this aura _like_ a curse?"

"Maybe?" Shuuichi says after thinking about it, eyes narrowed as he inspects the air conformed to Seiji's shape. "A curse is stronger. This is subtler. Nothing is visibly wrong, it's just a feeling of unease that I get looking at you."

"Don't you always?"

Shuuichi does not appreciate the jab. Not that he ever does. He averts his eyes, his mouth tugging to the side, and this is what's surprising. He should have stammered out a refute, thrown back a weak insult. Instead, he draws into himself with what seems to Seiji like guilt, like something left unsaid. "I'll be right back," he mutters, and is about to step into another room when he pauses. "Hiiragi, stand guard here. Tell me if anything happens."

One of his shiki swirls in, and despite its mask, it is obviously displeased. Rigid back, angled away from Seiji. Shuuichi had not directly told it to protect him, but it was suggested well enough if this is its reaction.

Though all spirits tend to treat Seiji this way. Particularly those Shuuichi has bound to serve him.

Shuuichi leaves. Seiji looks at the shiki, whose hand rests on the top of its staff held against its back. It stands sideways, so that all Seiji can see of its face is a sliver. Its lips are thinned to a grim line.

"I find this as useless as you," Seiji says, rounding the sofa, trailing a hand over it. "There is nothing to do about the inevitable."

"Yes," it says, stiffly, "but my master is kind." An ink drop of a pupil, pointed at him. "You forget that."

"I would call him foolish, actually."

"I think you call many things the wrong name." It slides its eye back to profile and walks away from him, the bells on its staff ringing faintly.

His own eye is narrowed, a reply at the back of his throat for this creature's disrespect, but Shuuichi's voice from wherever he's disappeared to says 'curse' to somebody, and Seiji's thoughts take less than a second to coalesce. He follows Shuuichi's voice and swoops into the room, throwing a paper charm at Shuuichi's phone. The charm slaps itself on the phone as it flies to the wall, where it clings, phone snug despite the paper's thinness.

"Matoba-san!" Shuuichi says, whirling around.

"You called the Natsume boy for help, didn't you?"

The pout he'd had slips off, replaced by what none could confuse for guilt. And then determination. "There has to be a way to prevent this! Curses can be broken—"

"—and fate can't," Seiji says, flat, but flat as the side of a blade: there is a threat at its edges. He walks to the wall, digging the phone out from its captivity, and hangs up the call. "It was only a guess this is a curse," he reminds Shuuichi. "I could indeed be murdered and bleed to death on your hardwood floors, just as you dreaded."

"I—"

"Or any of my organs could fail me from long-term poisoning. Or there is no fixed cause, varying with where I happen to be, but always the same outcome. Natori-san, I do not know what it will be, only that there is nothing to do about it. You need to accept this. The sooner you do," Seiji says, and stops there, the end to that sentence catching up to him.

Shuuichi looks at him, confused, like he's not certain he'd heard the incompletion. 

"You need to accept this," Seiji says, a repeat, an erasure of the unfinished clause: _The sooner you do, the easier it will be._

"It doesn't mean I have to be _glad_ about it." He snatches the phone from Seiji's hand and stalks to the door, reopening the distance between them. "You could show more emotion, you know. No way you're that alright with it! You're the head of an entire clan—"

"Natori-san," Seiji says, as he snaps his arms to his sides, the sound of the cloth a whisper sharper than his tone. "Anything you might say I have already considered. I'm the one who had the time to think about it because I'm the one affected. If you would so kindly stop your moralities dusted off only when convenient to you and let me spend the rest of my days in dignified tranquility, that would be appreciated."

"Then why did you come to _me_?" Shuuichi says, a hand at his chest, and his lizard on his hand. "If you really dislike how I am that much, why come to me when you're going to die?"

Seiji swallows his response, unthought of; it had glistened on its own to the tip of his tongue and been broken between his teeth. It tastes of glass shards, but better to have them pierce him instead of the precarious undefinability between them. Its words hadn't been properly formed; it was less that than memories and emotions, those things he's buried in a place deeper than where exorcised youkai go. And if he examines it, if he teases it to words, to a finality he will still not speak, the answer would be as simple as all someone groomed since noble birth to leadership is powered by: _I wanted to._

He doesn't say it. Never. Instead he turns his cheek, a reply demeaning him. He's awaiting Shuuichi's incredulous scoff.

What he gets is a quietly uttered realization: "You don't have anyone else."

The one who is ready to refute is Seiji. But Shuuichi is right, in a way. The arrows had been ambiguous in Seiji's trust of family, and Shuuichi is most definitely not family. He is the one exorcist not affiliated with the clan that Seiji could, perhaps—if the word was stretched out to its maximum—trust. He needs to provide Shuuichi with an answer as to his choosing to be with him in these last few days, because if he doesn't, Shuuichi, stubborn, will seek out the answer himself.

Let Shuuichi have this, then. It is even not a full lie.

"I'm hungry," Seiji announces, clearing away what had just happened, remaking the conversation to his favor. He exits the room, asking, "Do you have any food?"

Shuuichi patters after him. He blocks Seiji's entry to the kitchen. "I'll get you something. What do you want?"

"Nothing low-quality or foreign. If anything could be my last meal, it should be good."

He mulls it over. "There's a good restaurant that's a ten-minute walk or so away. It's been run by the same family for three generations." 

"Very well. Let's go."

"Wait, what? You want to go out?"

"I will not be a prisoner during my last days, Natori-san." He tilts his chin up, eyes down on Shuuichi, despite the insignificant centimeter Shuuichi has on him. "Regardless of where I am, what will come will come. Hiding out here will not save me any more than armor would."

Shuuichi's shoulders slump. "Right. Yeah. You're right." He runs his tongue over his lower lip. "Ah, do you know... if anything is going to happen to me?"

"I don't know. I did not ask that." Seiji presses his feet staunchly to the floor. "We could divine it. Rather, you could. With paper. I don't know the specificities, but I'm sure that as with other divinations, it will be needlessly complicated."

"I don't think that's necessary." His face is serious. "Do you feel anything when you look at me?"

"No," Seiji crisply says, taking the weight off his feet, transferring it to break his spine into a rod.

Shuuichi's brief frown resolves to raised eyebrows, pink cheeks. "I didn't mean it like that! I meant if there's something hanging on to me like on you. If you can sense something off."

Seiji studies him. Dust-colored hair, too-large clothes, the papercut edge of his mouth. Same Natori Shuuichi as always. "I can't," he says. "But to ascertain my fate is not entwined with yours, you should gather paper to divine—"

"No," Shuuichi says, with the conviction of the head of a clan. The last of his clan, and thus the sole leader and follower.

And Seiji's displeasure is the kind veneered by the impatience of a clan head above him. "Don't be unreasonable, Natori-san. If you are affected, you should know."

"Just because you messed with divination doesn't mean I need to." He crosses his arms, turns his head. "I don't think this is the kind of thing anyone should know."

"You," Seiji says, accusation and disbelief at once, "would forgo knowing something this important because of moral objection?"

"It'd make me paranoid." Shuuichi puts his hands deep in his pockets, standing hunched. "I'd spend the rest of my life worried over when it'd happen and how and if I could do everything I wanted to, instead of just enjoying my days. So I don't care how disgusted you are that we're not all power-hungry. I'm fine as I am." He walks to the sofa and slings his jacket back on. "Let's go eat, then."

With rot coating his tongue, and feeling like he trails it behind him with every step, Seiji follows.

* * *

The restaurant is small, tucked between larger buildings. In the night it would be easy to miss, but in the daytime, its colorful banner catches the light better than the drab grayness of what flanks it. It's moderately crowded, making Seiji ambivalent. One of the people here could be who kills him. But if not, whatever conversation he and Shuuichi have will blend in.

That is if they talk. From the stiffness with which Shuuichi carries himself, and how Seiji dared only look at his back, having glanced away when Shuuichi peeked over his shoulder in their walk, it is unlikely.

The proprietor recognizes Shuuichi, warmly welcoming him and—

"Someone I know," Shuuichi says in Seiji's stead.

So that's what he is.

"Could you sit us in a corner?" Shuuichi asks, eyes flitting about, like fish disturbed in a pond.

"Sure, sure! This way."

Shuuichi slides onto the seat with its back to the wall before Seiji can. Seiji frowns at him, but Shuuichi doesn't notice. He has not stopped darting his eyes toward the entrance.

"Relax, Natori-san," Seiji says, cracking apart his chopsticks after they order, and the noise makes Shuuichi jump as he redirects his attention to him.

"I'm relaxed!"

"You _are_ aware the one dying is me, and not you?"

Whatever Shuuichi was next about to say is gone as he closes his mouth, irk smothered. He scrutinizes Seiji's outline. "Yes," he says, strangely subdued. Now he meets Seiji's eyes. "I was wondering, actually, how you picked... that... up." He gestures to Seiji like what clings to him is visible. "It couldn't have come from nowhere."

"I woke up with it. It's possible for youkai to come without notice."

"You'd have noticed a youkai, though, and fought it off. This feels like something else. Something _like_ it, but not a youkai itself."

Their orders are brought, and the conversation lulls as Shuuichi thanks the waitress, waiting for her to take her leave again before they resume what no stranger's ears should behold.

"What happened in between the exorcism and the morning?" Shuuichi asks, the steam from his bowl clouding over his glasses. He pockets them, and the sincerity in his eyes, laid bare, makes Seiji tell him.

"I bathed," he starts. "Washed my hair. Repaired my broken geta—" He stops. Remembers it for a superstition; even when it had happened he had realized it, and discarded it for frivolity. "Well."

Shuuichi has realized it, too. "You really forgot what that means?"

"I did not. But it is so inane and a common enough occurrence I did not think it would be serious."

"Did you break any other superstitions?"

"Not that I know of. After I got back to my room, I moved the futon."

"Did it have tatami mats?"

"Of course."

"You could have stepped on its border, maybe? That's also bad luck."

Seiji's frown is at himself. The night had been moonless; he had not checked where his feet stood. And in admitting he'd moved his bed, he is reminded of another superstition: of sleeping north. He'd not considered that at all. Nor has he ever, really. He gathers noodles between his chopsticks but does not yet raise them to his mouth. "I also," he says, "heard crows in the morning."

Many small superstitions, one after the other, following the defeat of a thing unnatural, culminated to this.

"If you suggest I hunt down good superstitions to make up for the bad," Seiji says, "I will throw my food at you, Natori-san."

Shuuichi dips his head, chopsticks stirring his food aimlessly.

 _I should have noticed_ , Seiji thinks, broken geta and tatami and the stars and a crow flitting in a reel across his mind, stuttered like old film. He eats without tasting anything. 

Death is the end condemned to everything. The living, for to live is to die ever so slowly; abominations like youkai, which can be exorcised; things like stories, in their conclusions. To have his be so preventable would have made him laugh, had it been happening to anyone else. But he is Matoba Seiji, and he was destined for more. 

Another waiter passes by, headed for another table, but his movement is so swift it catches Seiji's eye. But not as much as what he carries, its shape and color immediately recognizable: loquats, spooned over jelly. He watches the waiter go until the restaurant's architecture hides his destination.

When he looks back, he sees Shuuichi had been watching the waiter, too; he's just turning his head around, and accidentally meets Seiji's eye.

"I... guess they're in season," Shuuichi says.

"Yes." His chopsticks hit the bottom of the bowl, shallower than he thought. "It's summer, after all."

The clink of chopsticks, the murmur of others' words. Then Shuuichi says, "I never had one again after that day."

 _That day_ , he says. No more is needed. 

Seiji is quite aware of the neutrality he assumes as he says, "Really?" 

"Really. But maybe I should."

"You should." Neutrality. "They're sweet without being overbearing."

"I guess I could get that for dessert..."

It wouldn't be the same as the fruit proper, freshly plucked from a tree, but Seiji keeps that to himself.

"Are they really not that sweet, or is this you being biased?" Shuuichi asks.

"'Biased'?"

"You like sweet things, so what you don't think is very sweet could make my teeth fall off."

"Nanase has tried them as well, and she would agree with me," he says, not allowing a smile, however small, to cross his face that Shuuichi remembers something about him.

"Nanase-san? When has she ever tried them?"

He snaps a vegetable between his chopsticks. "I liked them enough we made a deal with a local farm. They provide us with a share of their crop if we exorcise their fields. It was a successful trade and we have maintained it since. I alone cannot eat all the fruit, though."

"Oh," Shuuichi says, with a tone Seiji has never heard him use, a mixture of different emotions. There's surprise in it, he thinks, but that is the only one he can name.

But he won't be the only one vulnerable here. So he says, casual as he can make it, "I'm flattered you remember my fondness for sweets."

"I mean," Shuuichi says, with color beginning to tinge the tips of his ears, "you hid under a table at a meeting once, eating them. That's hard to forget. You weren't even supposed to be there."

"I wasn't, no. I was under a table."

"The _meeting_." 

"That, too."

Shuuichi's mouth pulls up into a faint smile, but he eats, and perhaps it was a trick, a wishful hope, in Seiji's part. But he does say, "You got away with a lot as a kid, didn't you?"

"Obviously. As did you, I'm sure."

"Only because no one was supervising me. Did you ignore what your people told you when you didn't like it? Wait, don't answer, that was stupid to ask," Shuuichi says, as Seiji smirks, but it flattens when he adds, "You came to visit me, after all."

Shuuichi had been haunted by something of his own, once. But it was a youkai, defeatable; it was something known. Seiji had exorcised him of it. Had waited for Shuuichi to wake after it had sapped his strength. 

He'd been the one to go to Shuuichi then. Like today. Though with roles reversed; though with his fate sealed tighter than a youkai in a pot. 

And still Shuuichi had wanted to help.

Seiji picks at his food. Eats it only because he doesn't know what to say without twisting it to conform with the image Shuuichi has of him, and which he means to uphold until he can't.

He doesn't finish his food. Shuuichi does. But.

"I have no room for dessert," he says. "I'll get it another time."

Seiji might not be there for another time, which Shuuichi belatedly realizes, his eyes going wide. 

"Ah. Well," he says, embarrassed, knowing an apology would do nothing.

"It's fine, Natori-san," Seiji says. "Just try it eventually."

"I will," he says, like a promise, more serious than any talk of dessert should be.

Seiji shifts in his seat. "At least allow me to pay for today."

"No, I got it. Do you even have money on you?"

Oh. He doesn't.

Shuuichi laughs. A little. But it's a laugh. "Yeah, I thought so."

He pays—and more than their bill, if the proprietor's shock, polite rejection, and profuse _thank you_ s are any indication—and they leave. The sun has hardly moved; night is hours away.

 _How many days of this?_ Seiji wonders in their walk back to the apartment.

Reentering its emptiness, with a modicum more ease than before, he notices that on the kitchen counter are sheets of paper, scribbled on, littered over torn envelopes. Letters? 

Shuuichi sees where Seiji's eye has gone and hurries over to gather the maybe-letters, flipping them upside down.

Seiji narrows his eyes.

"So," Shuuichi says, a little too loudly, "you can take my bed for the night."

He flicks his eyes from the papers to Shuuichi's face. "That would be rude of me," he says, instead of _I do not think I can sleep on your bed_.

"If you'd demanded it before I told you you could have it, yeah. But I offered it."

Seiji glances at the sofa, large and blocky, unused as the day it had been delivered. He doesn't want to sleep on that, either. 

_Why did I come here?_ he asks himself, and is answered by another part of himself, one he has ignored to near-death, clinging stubbornly to life, exacerbated by where he is: _You know why_.

"You'll come around," Shuuichi says. "I don't think any Matoba clan head would sleep on anyone's couch. Especially not a Natori." He looks at the window, its sheer curtains drawn almost-closed letting in a thin rectangle of sun washed out by the apartment's artificial lights. "Anyway, it's still light out. You don't have to hole yourself up in my room until night."

Seiji hums absently. The day is incomplete, but he has nothing on his person except his clothes. All there is to do except sleep, but it is too early.

Had he always spent his days working? Exorcisms are one thing, but the paperwork is never-ending. Meetings to host or attend always filled up his calendar. 

There is none of that now.

"If you want to watch TV—" Shuuichi hesitantly starts, but Seiji cuts him off.

"No."

Shuuichi sighs. "Yeah, I figured." He glances at it, and Seiji follows his gaze. A faint cover of dust speckles the black screen. 

"No food, barely any furniture, and a disused television," Seiji says, walking past Shuuichi to take a seat at the sofa. "Do you really live here?"

"I do! Where else would I go, the Natori house?" He says it bitterly. 

"Your family's library is there, is it not?"

"What I haven't thought important enough to have here, anyway."

"I see," Seiji says, making himself think of anything that's not the Natori family's knowledge, unknown even by his clan, being somewhere here.

But perhaps it is in his posture, or it's expected of him to have wondered that, because Shuuichi says, "Do you want to read them?"

For an exorcist to share their unique techniques is to bare one's soul. Deeper than that, even; techniques are refined over a clan's generations, the culmination of many people's efforts. The Natori clan's paper-wielding is legendary, unable to be replicated by anyone outside it, and not for lack of effort. Seiji himself has tried to command paper with the ease Shuuichi can, but is not as successful in it as him. No one is. No one who is not a Natori has read their works. 

Here is Shuuichi offering it.

"Natori-san," Seiji says, "that's quite the offer you're making."

He crosses his arms. "I know what it means. I'm still asking you."

 _Yes_ , Seiji thinks, but he does not say it. Yet.

"No other exorcist puts as much effort into what they do as you," Shuuichi says. "It's... the least I can do. You've probably been curious about it since you met me."

"And it's not as if I will be able to tell anyone what I read." 

Shuuichi snaps his eyes to him.

"It's the truth." Seiji raises an elegant shoulder, forced nonchalance.

"Do you want to read them or not?"

He pauses. "Yes. I'm honored. Thank you."

Shuuichi doesn't seem to know what to do with that response; he leaves for wherever he keeps his clan's knowledge stored in this sprawling desolation and returns with arms full of scrolls and books, yellowed and dusted by time. He repeats this three times.

"Just be careful handling them," he says, setting the last pile on the living room table.

"Of course." 

Seiji grabs a scroll at random, holding it as a mother would her child. From the title, it's not paper-wielding.

He reads it anyway, poring over each character, penned centuries ago by a man who does not exist in his family tree. He knows most of what the scroll speaks of, but to read what he was taught from someone not a Matoba, in a place his clan has no dominion over—it is a small thrill, one last rebellion before it all ends.

Reading with just one eye strains it, and so he removes the eyepatch, folding it next to him. The trusted, flimsy barrier that has made the Matoba name will be just a detail in his life's story.

He isn't sure how long he reads, absorbed as he is, appreciative of what masters without his blood have to say, selfishly reading the paper-wielders' secrets as if memorizing them will be helpful any time soon. It's when he hears a light cough that he looks up, neck straining, eyes dry. He blinks, suddenly aware the lights overhead are brighter—because the sunlight from the window has receded, and night has crept in. At the opposite corner of the sofa stands Shuuichi, dressed for sleeping, folded clothes on his hands.

"You didn't bring a change of clothes," he says, "so you can borrow mine."

Seiji hadn't thought of wardrobe or toiletries before his sojourn. He should have, though; he can begrudgingly accept taking Shuuichi's bed for a night, but not his clothes. "I will not," he says, turning back to the scroll. "My own clothes will do. You can purchase a spare set for me tomorrow, if I do not die this night."

"You're going to sleep in _that_?"

"Yes." He gives Shuuichi a look that stops whatever argument he next would have made.

"Fine," Shuuichi says, taking his clothes back. "But... it's kind of late, and I'm tired. Could you go read this in my room? The light's better there anyway, since there's a lamp right next to my bed. I'll help you move what you haven't gotten to yet."

It _is_ late. And he is intruding in Shuuichi's space. In his family's readings. "Thank you," he says, rising, gathering what he has yet to read. 

Shuuichi helps and walks them over, and though it is his room, he keeps close to the door, placing the scrolls and books and loose parchments on the floor. It is Seiji who is further in, having believed Shuuichi would follow rather than lingering like a stranger in his own room. It only makes the realization of where he is and why he is here that much deeper, carved too by the lamp, in the warmth where it glows and the stark, angular shadows it casts because of its existence.

"Well," Shuuichi says, "see you in the morning." And he closes the door without waiting for a response.

Not that Seiji had any. 

He looks at the papers. There is enough material for more hours of reading, which could be completed tomorrow. 

And there could be no tomorrow. But standing in Shuuichi's bedroom, muscles worn after hours of sitting, they protest for rest. His eyes, too, stay closed longer with every blink.

 _Tomorrow, then_ , he thinks, tentatively. He looks at the bed, hastily made, physically covering up that someone else would normally use it. But Seiji knows.

He sits at the bed's very edge. Nothing happens to him. He breathes in, slow and deep, the way an archer would prepare for their arrow, and inches further on the bed. It does not dip under him but he does wrinkle the sheets. He stops, smooths them out. Slowly swings his legs over, then under the bed sheets. He looks back to the pillow—a fresh cover; it's too white—and his hair in his periphery tickles his cheek.

With even greater attention, increased in this strange environment so quiet his heartbeat echoes, he undoes the tie on his hair. It flows around him, free, and he weaves his fingers through it to untie the eyepatch he remembers is already off. He'd left it in the living room. 

Shuuichi had seen him with his scar and said nothing.

He huffs but a knock at the door cuts it short.

"Um," Shuuichi says, creaking open the door, a hand peeking through with— "your eyepatch."

Seiji quickly rises, as if caught in an indecent act, and grabs the eyepatch without touching Shuuichi's hand. He does not murmur his thanks and closes the door, leaning on it a moment as he studies the eyepatch.

He doesn't need it anymore, does he? 

But he can't leave it. It would be to abandon part of himself, and he intends to die whole. He ties it on and strides back to the bed, ignoring the ritual he'd undergone to first get on it. He shuts off the lamp. The darkness is immediate.

* * *

Seiji wakes from something dry and dreamless and yet deep, deep enough that for a moment he thinks he has drifted onto another dream, one where he's in a sparsely decorated room in a bed smelling of familiar paper and sun.

He blinks, the rest he'd gotten dissipating, and understands this is no dream. This is Shuuichi's bed, in Shuuichi's apartment. The haven Seiji had been given when he'd told Shuuichi of his numbered days. 

His hand slinks further in under the pillow; his right cheek sinks deeper on its side, eye pressed to blindness, pinpricks of light behind his single closed lid as his good eye, open, stares unseeingly out the window. 

A breath in—paper, sun, a sweetness like fruit; the oils from his own hair, iron from exquisitely made arrows and from the deposits within his own blood, singing discord in his ears. Scents that should not mingle. But here they are.

Seiji stands slowly, as to not have his blood thrum in his head, ties back his hair, and shuffles to the living room, where he expects Shuuichi to be splayed on the sofa with none of the poise of a model but a tired young adult.

The one who meets him is yesterday's masked shiki. Immediately he puts together what has happened, and immediately he sweeps over to the door—but the servant, inhuman, is faster. It blocks the door with its body and staff. Seiji cannot see its face, but no doubt its mouth is as hardened as his.

"Master commanded me to keep you from leaving," it says.

"And I am commanding you to ignore that order." He tilts his chin up, a strand of hair falling over his good eye. Individual hairs flutter past his eyelashes and threaten to stick to the white of his eye, and the feeling is uncomfortable, but he does not show it. He looks down at the shiki. "He's at the Natori house, isn't he?"

Its lack of reply is as good as a confirmation. It's how Shuuichi would have reacted.

Seiji says, "You must realize what a pointless endeavor he's just undertaken."

"Yes."

"And you let him leave regardless?"

"He wouldn't see reason," the youkai complains. "But I couldn't forcibly stop him. He's my master; his will is mine to obey."

"How loyal of you," Seiji says. "Now move." 

The youkai balances its weight between its feet, spread out in a defensive stance. "You are not my master. You cannot order me."

"You do not need to be my creature to obey me," Seiji says, a smile hacked onto his face as he summons one of his servants, smoke coughing up from nothing, and just as aromatic. Its hunched back is more pronounced in the apartment's low roof, perversely long arms and legs coiled in to fit. But with Seiji's subtle head inclination to Shuuichi's shiki, his servant undulates its body in a fury toward it. His thinks of little—it is a creature made to serve, not question—but it follows Seiji's wordless order for the fervor it burns in him: _Get me out of this place_. 

Shuuichi's shiki cries out as Seiji's jumps at it, pushing it from its guard post, but not harming it fully; the shiki had whipped its staff in front to deflect Seiji's servant, owning no weapon but its claws, honed from the shadows that thicken into its limbs. His scratches like a feral beast; Shuuichi's defends, having no break in between attacks. 

And in this skirmish, the door clears. Seiji smirks at Shuuichi's servant and slips out the door, trusting a memory worn and warm as a childhood blanket to lead him to the Natori house.

* * *

The house has shrunk. It isn't just that Seiji has grown. The Natori house has huddled in on itself, decrepit of people and belief with its sole scion no longer calling it home.

 _If he had ever_ , Seiji muses, pressing a finger to the well-maintained doorbell. The house may have shrunk, but its appearances have not. 

Appearances.

The door is swung open by a small old woman—the housekeeper, Seiji's memory supplies. Despite time's passage she remains as old as he remembers.

She does not seem to recall him, however. "Yes?" she asks. "May I help you?"

"This is the Natori house," he says, a statement, no polite segue of questions he knows the answers to, "and— Shuuichi-san is here." A hitch, recalling how Shuuichi's name sounds like freed from its mental cage. The _Natori-san_ he has taken to naming the last several years would not be the son here, but the neglectful father.

"Who might you be?" the woman asks, wary, but her eyes soon widen. "You were here once as a young boy, weren't you? Shuuichi-san's friend. With your long hair and eyepatch, I didn't recognize you."

He tautly pulls the corners of his mouth up. "Yes. I am Matoba Seiji. I have urgent business with Shuuichi-san. If you would," he says, eyeing the inside of the house glimpsed within the gap of the opened door.

"Please follow me," she says, letting him in.

The house has tasteful modern décor, startling against its ancient framework. From the windows falls in sunlight, plenty of it, yet it is flat, as if it doesn't want to be there. It is wrong, somehow, in seeing and in feeling it in flashes as they walk under the windows' tepid reflections. 

In the back garden, the sun shines true, glistening on the storage shed where the Natori family has thrown out reminders of who they used to be. Its doors are open, stacks of papers standing as wobbly guards. 

Shuuichi has been here some time, then. How early did he rise for this uselessness?

Seiji ignores the rope that's been made in his chest, twisting in ache now sorrowful, now hopeful, now sorrowful. He tips his head and obliquely bows at the housekeeper in thanks, then approaches the shed.

He hears the rustles and dull thumps of paper being moved and tossed. He rounds the shed's corner and sees Shuuichi, who sits, taking from a pile to his right, mumbling as he skims the text, grimacing, and placing what he'd read to a taller pile on the left. 

"I go to you to have someone speak for me after I'm gone, and you go and leave yourself," Seiji says, the words absorbed greedily by this shed long unused to any voice.

Shuuichi, for his part, had yelped and sat up with Seiji's very first syllable. His arm had bumped the left pile, sending it in disarray. He peeks over the right pile that partly obscured Seiji's view of him. Guilt and sleeplessness furrow in his features. "I haven't been gone long," he insists, with the trace of a whine. "It's only been—" He squints. "Wait, the sun's up?"

Seiji crosses his arms into his sleeves as his lip turns down. "Natori-san, this is as irresponsible as it is pointless. How many times must I tell you?"

"I've made some progress!" He gestures to the left pile. "These talk about divination. It's a finicky art—"

"Yes, I am aware."

"—that's open to interpretation—"

"Natori-san, since I could understand speech I have been educated of the unnatural. This includes divination. Whatever you might have learned the past night, I have known for a lifetime. Some divinations are not metaphorical, such as belomancy. Yes-or-no questions. It's simple. It's done." He briskly walks over to Shuuichi and nudges the right pile with his foot, the entire thing tumbling down. "Like that is done. Now let us return so that you can do the single dying task I asked of you, shall we?"

Shuuichi winces. "I wanted to help."

"Which you can do if you simply keep close to me." He turns sharply on his heel. "Passivity, Natori-san. Learn it. Not everything is salvageable by throwing oneself at it. You already know what you can do because I have told you. So do it."

This is the house Shuuichi grew up in, the shed where he spent most of those days, and he seems lost. His eyes drift between the surroundings and Seiji as if they're all strangers. Then the helplessness leaves him, in deflation, his sagging shoulders and downturned eyes a resignation unbecoming in someone as stubborn as him. 

"There's something I haven't told you," Shuuichi tells the dusty ground. He raises his head and then his body, with that single centimeter he has on Seiji that has always seemed to not exist. "Lately, I've been getting weird letters from a fan."

What he'd seen on the counter. Some of Seiji's sharpness bends. "That explains your increased nervousness." 

"It hasn't been anything threatening; I haven't actually been stalked. It's just a fan's misplaced perceptions," Shuuichi continues. "I know your divination didn't say anything about me, but with that and your timing, I got... worried. Worried the letter writer would get aggressive and that something would happen to you because of me." He runs a hand through his already disheveled hair. "So I really wanted to fix this. But it really can't be, can it."

Seiji is silent.

Shuuichi chuckles, dry as the paper crumbling here. "All this stuff, and nothing was very helpful. Even my pile there"—with his foot, he points to the one still standing—"isn't particularly good. Just text that said a little about divination. But part of me thought maybe I hadn't read it well enough or something." Another laugh— no, a scoff, and his foot topples the left pile. "No. You were right, Matoba-san. I shouldn't have left you alone, either." Seiji sees him bite the inside of his cheek before he adds, "Sorry."

He has Shuuichi's concession, after his repeated derisions. An apology, even. And he wants to paste them over a target to shoot arrows at them both until his fingers bleed.

"I guess we can go now," Shuuichi says, oblivious to Seiji's thoughts concealed under his perpetual mask. "There's nothing for us here."

Something small squelches. Behind them? Seiji turns.

It was a stone fruit, once, but it has rotted, brownness of overripeness mottling to dead black. The flesh is splattered like blood, clotted after several hours; the stone lays like a calcified heart that has beaten its last. The Natori garden has no fruit trees that could have dropped it. It must have come from—

A caw. Seiji walks away from the shed to where he can glimpse the sky. And in it flies a crow, talons pierced through with what glistens like old fruit.

Fallen fruit is not an omen, but another crow (or is it the same? Would he ever know, the way a crow remembers faces?) crying overhead as he thinks and speaks of death...

 _Soon_ , he thinks, with detached certainty. 

What he says is, "Yes. I think we can go now."

Shuuichi clearly wants to say something, but he doesn't. His nod is stiff, his legs the same as he goes past Seiji, leading him out of the house. The housekeeper must have gone to another wing; she does not see them off. And Shuuichi's father, alive but haunted by the family's name, would never do so. If he even noticed his son had returned to delve into the past the family poorly buried.

When they're a street away from the house, Shuuichi asks, "Have you eaten yet?" For a semblance of courtesy, Seiji assumes. 

"I have not." 

"We can go get something, if you want." 

Natori Shuuichi, inviting him out for breakfast, another apology not in actions but in words. As if this is something he would have done even if he'd not defied Seiji's single request. 

He finds a corner of his lip turning up. "I'm fine, thank you."

"Are you sure? I, uh. Don't really have anything at home."

The lift in his lip is truer. "Am I meant to be surprised by that when you take the concept of home décor minimalism to the extreme?"

The speckles of light making their way from between trees to the sidewalks are enough for Seiji to see the color on Shuuichi's cheeks. And as expected when affronted, Shuuichi changes the subject. "How did you get past Hiiragi, anyway?"

Seiji's smirk could cut steel itself. "Did you think a mere youkai would keep me, the head of the Matoba exorcists, from doing what I pleased?"

"Did you exorcise her?!"

"No. My shiki is simply keeping yours occupied."

"You _summoned_ one?"

"Why wouldn't I?"

"They're your family's, right? And you're wary of them because of the fortune, which is why you came to me. But you summoned one? What if that had been how..." He doesn't finish the sentence. 

And it hadn't crossed Seiji's mind at all that his own shiki would turn on him. All he'd wanted was to escape the apartment to find Shuuichi.

But Shuuichi does not need to know that.

"It was a calculated risk," Seiji replies.

"You can be weirdly impulsive—" Shuuichi's upper body twists around, his lips drawn tighter than a bowstring. 

Seiji looks where Shuuichi is focused on. Sees nothing but the street they've walked. He raises an eyebrow at Shuuichi.

"I thought," Shuuichi says, "that I felt something watching us."

"You are famous," Seiji says, the distaste innate to the word. "Surely you get the press after you."

Shuuichi turns to Seiji. "This wasn't like that. Didn't you feel it? It was really brief but— menacing."

"Your stalker? I did not feel anything."

He looks uneasy. "Maybe. But still, if they saw me with someone else, I would think they'd... I don't know, glare at you. Direct hostility to you." His brow is creased. "You really felt nothing?"

"I felt nothing," he reaffirms.

Shuuichi's expression turns to self-doubt. He briefly slides his glasses to his scalp to rub his eyes. "I've been up for hours. I might be imagining things."

"Perhaps," Seiji says, as he thinks he sees the shadows at their feet darken like they are overflowed with ink, as he thinks he feels the humidity that should seep lethargically through the day drip in all at once, and as he is most definitely pierced through with a knife. 

There is pressure at Seiji's back as the attacker leans all of their weight into the knife. It sinks through the dark of his kimono, to skin—top layer, pale and hidden from the sun; the second, crisscrossed by blood vessels and nerves now severed, sending electric flashes of _pain pain pain_ to the part of Seiji's brain that needs no words to gather meaning; the third layer, the last protection, the color of butter, parted richly as that—into the stringy underlying muscle, and then quickly swung between bones to reach the heart, skewering it for the meat it is. 

That is when he makes an involuntary noise, choked—blood? His own shock?—and so does Shuuichi, but it is loud and sharp, not of pain but horror. And Seiji's legs fold under him, the ground approaching, but he does not hit it. He's caught, arms around him, dust and sun and paper, and a sound like his name.

No, it is his name. Just _Seiji_. Frantically yelled close to his ear, over and over, a hall of mirrors reflecting not a face but a name in its barest truth after years ( _years_?) of concealment.

It is. Nice. The sound, his name, himself, fades with every iteration. But he hears it. It's nice. Though there's something else vague in the back of his hazy mind. Something about Shuuichi looking at who has killed him instead of him. Whatever that makes him _him_ is disappearing, and he lightens, dying and young and accomplished but what for? 

It takes all the strength Seiji has spent twenty-two years cultivating to pick his head up a fraction. Enough to glance at Shuuichi, the lizard running madly up his neck. He's screaming a summons to his shiki and an order to catch the attacker. So they must be clan-affiliated, then, if Shuuichi has involved his creatures. Or he's not thinking. That, too, is likely, because Shuuichi is clutching him to his own chest, blooming with red passed from Seiji. And he's still saying his name. It's _nice_. He should never stop saying it. Why had he? 

Ah. Right.

What has all of Seiji's life been for, in the end, when all it has taken to down him is a knife; and when like this, in Shuuichi's hold, something else he's long refrained from divulging to him is rolling around on his tongue, bitter and hot as oversteeped tea?

 _I do not know if it's love_ , he thinks, with Shuuichi's tear-bright eyes on his, _but it has never been hate_. 

He wants to say it. He can't. His body will not listen, now when he wants it to, now that it is too late and really it had always been, hadn't it, when neither of them had changed in the face of what they knew to come?

Shuuichi blurs, as if seen through water. Seiji feels no tears welling, but no, it's not him; it's reality itself, desaturating, quieting, undoing its fine constructs to dim outlines of the world to utter, indistinguishable black.

* * *

It doesn't feel like anything except fear, but that comes from Seiji. The scroll of his life unrolls in the black. Pictures pass by in rough transitions: a bow meant to be raised becomes an arrow already loosened becomes a target stabbed through by the dozens becomes him, showing his life in growing height and narrowing smiles. 

And flecked through the black are the faces and bodies of those who met him, knew him, and stayed. 

He sees the things written—the feats he boasted, the pain he would not show.

He sees the unwritten, the could-have-beens, and that hurts more than everything that went wrong: that things could have been right. If only he'd done, said, tried more.

He sees a black bird the size of a house looming over him, casting no shadow where a shadow should be. It looks at him with a human's round, cruel, curious eyes, but red and bright as gemstones. Its beak could cleave him in twain, and where it juts from its face it curls up shallowly, like a smile Seiji himself might have worn.

ɪ ᴀᴍ ᴛʜᴇ ʙɪʀᴅ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ʙʟᴀᴅᴇ, it says— no, it reverberates, directly into Seiji's bones, or his soul, or whatever most basic essence of him remains here. ʏᴏᴜ ᴀʀᴇ ᴍᴀᴛᴏʙᴀ ꜱᴇɪᴊɪ.

Seiji presses his lips together. This isn't death. A purgatory of some kind, ruled by a youkai in the knife that did him in. And even a creature like this knows his name. But is that because of his reputation? Because it is the youkai's power? Because it has been contracted to kill him?

"That I am," Seiji says. He can speak here, his body-if-a-body obeys, but his voice has no echo. The black absorbs it as soon as it hears it. "How might you know that?"

ɪ ᴋɴᴏᴡ ᴀʟʟ ᴡʜᴏ ᴍᴇᴇᴛ ᴍʏ ʙʟᴀᴅᴇ. The bird bends to peer down at him, less than an arm's length from Seiji's face. It does not open its beak, but its smirk seems to widen. ᴀɴᴅ ɪ ᴋɴᴏᴡ ᴍʏ ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀ ꜱᴇʀᴠᴇꜱ ʏᴏᴜ. 

Betrayed by the clan after all. If any of Seiji's organs should remain here, they are now gutted.

"I'm in your blade, then?" Seiji asks, inspecting his arm. He feels the eyepatch on, and he wears what he had in life; he sees the sleeve of his kimono as if by candlelight. 

A trick. It is just the dark, with him and the bird, which draws itself to its full height.

ʏᴏᴜ ᴀʀᴇ.

He lowers his hand, smiling emptily. "And I'm dead?"

ʏᴏᴜ ᴀʀᴇ. The bird cocks its head. A single eye to judge him with. ʙᴜᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ᴅᴏ ɴᴏᴛ ɴᴇᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ.

Youkai tricks even in purgatory. Of course.

"How so?" he asks, folding his hands behind his back in a show of casual power, the least he can do to convince himself—and the youkai—that he wields any here.

ɪꜰ ʏᴏᴜ ᴠᴀʟᴜᴇ ꜱᴏᴍᴇᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴍᴏʀᴇ ᴛʜᴀɴ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʟɪꜰᴇ, the bird says, spreading its wings, feathers stretching on to infinity at the horizon, nauseating Seiji, ᴛʜᴇɴ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ɪꜱ ᴡʜᴀᴛ ɪ ᴡᴀɴᴛ. ɪɴ ᴇxᴄʜᴀɴɢᴇ, ɪ ᴡɪʟʟ ʀᴇᴛᴜʀɴ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʟɪꜰᴇ.

A strand of Seiji's hair falls over his eyepatch, and there he lets it stay. "How do I know you will stand by your end of the bargain?" he asks.

ʏᴏᴜ ᴀʀᴇ ɪɴ ᴍʏ ᴅᴏᴍᴀɪɴ. ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ ɪꜱ ɴᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ ꜰᴏʀ ᴍᴇ ᴛᴏ ɢᴀɪɴ ɪ ᴅᴏ ɴᴏᴛ ᴀʟʀᴇᴀᴅʏ ʜᴀᴠᴇ. ɪ ᴡɪʟʟ ꜱɪᴍᴘʟʏ ᴛᴀᴋᴇ ᴡʜᴀᴛ ɪꜱ ᴏꜰ ɢʀᴇᴀᴛᴇʀ ᴡᴏʀᴛʜ. The bird folds in eternity on its wings. 

His eyes narrow, and had he the need to breathe, the air would be lodged in his lungs. "Did your master not command you keep me dead?"

ᴍʏ ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀ ɪꜱ ɴᴏᴛ ᴡʜᴏ ᴋɪʟʟᴇᴅ ʏᴏᴜ.

Seiji hunches back his shoulder blades as if he means to take flight himself. He raises his head to better look at the bird. He will not speak of the arrows' divination—it will not help to be seen as vulnerable, guided by the threads that weave the world—and so he cannot imply in any way he believed the clan would turn on him. 

But he needs an answer. If he is to take the youkai's deal, he will return with a vengeance.

"Then who?" he says, in a voice like a blade restored to an edge.

ɪ ᴋɴᴏᴡ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ɴᴏᴛ. ᴛʜᴇʏ ᴡɪᴇʟᴅᴇᴅ ᴍᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ɪ ᴏʙᴇʏᴇᴅ. 

A Matoba clan weapon, in the hands of one who is not. The clan the source of the problem, but not the hand that meted it. It must be why the arrow was ambiguous on trusting his family. Seiji does not let out a sigh of relief—he will not let the youkai have the satisfaction of seeing him out of power—but he feels it settling his bones into their rightful place. He will not need to scorch the clan to ashes and see what rises.

That is if he returns. Because if the bird wants something of his he values more than his life, it is not the hair he has grown out. A laughable notion. 

No, it can only be his eye.

He has power, the greatest of all the exorcists. He has a family tree that has taken nutrients wherever it has found them. So he—as himself and as the sum of his ancestral parts—also has enemies. Lore has had centuries to be spun of the clan, some of it real, some deceptions they have cultivated to their favor. All for power. That a youkai has persisted through leaders, passing by like leaves, to take the promised eye; that the clan knows this, keeps it away, but never kills it—that is truth and power at its richest. To rescind the eye is to insult every previous head who has been singly tormented and the people who have studied the youkai to chase it away. His hair is himself, but his eye is the clan and every leader who has speared it, then and now.

He has been taught to see the world in binary. There is black and there is white and there is Seiji's home with the shadows, the faded choices of his past coming together to how he stands now, in a gray only the things he must kill belong to. And now, in between places, he has another choice, one that he has no readied answer for. One where he must think of the consequences not just for himself but for what he could leave behind.

"If I choose to give you my life," Seiji asks, slowly, each word measured, "what will await me in death?"

ɴᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ, is the reply, containing everything. ʏᴏᴜ ʟɪᴠᴇ ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴀʟʟ. ʏᴏᴜ ᴅɪᴇ ᴡɪᴛʜ ɴᴏɴᴇ. 

So. He could die, as fated. As he had accepted (no. Yes. No—). The life he had been assigned by the selfishness of his parents giving rise to him, his pre-written history that he had added broad strokes to: all of that, gone. The good, with all he has done for the clan. The bad, because he must word it: he does not always love this life. He could let go, at last, becoming a legacy taught to future exorcists. And he would not see— him again. (What was the taste of loquats? How did a summer school uniform feel like? Was paper grainy or smooth; what of knowing someone who did not want to be known? _He would not see him again._ )

Or. He could live. Betray expectations. Continue on the loneliness he treads, with the pride and misery both that he retains, committing himself and just himself in deeper for every year he—the revered, despised head of the Matoba clan—breathes. Estrange the youkai as much as the humans, who he might see, but there the familiarity would end, as who he was before. 

Unless.

He could make changes. He did not finish everything, even in his rush to tie the clan's loose ends. If he returns, there is more to do. To say. Broken teacups can be imbued with gold to serve again; a broken person could learn the art for themselves, too. (Because Seiji can't leave him behind, not like this; there could be bliss in letting go but it is not in him. That he could do it is a lie, just one of thousands. Some told to convince himself of what he is, some of what he isn't, and some about _Shuuichi_ ; there, let his name be his name be the truth, because the lies' weight piles up, and everything collapses—)

And he knows what he must choose.

He tugs off the eyepatch in a single motion, paper tearing silently. Meets the bird's eyes and his reflection drenched in red upon them. In them, his own are mirrored, the good one and the scarred one, the youkai's claws forever etched in white, through interrupted eyebrow and torn eyelid, ending at his orbital cavity. The eyepatch flutters from his hand, and though it should fall on a semblance of a ground—for Seiji stands—it simply disappears when it reaches what supports Seiji's feet, as if the not-ground has swallowed it.

"Take my eye, and return my life," Seiji commands, because even if he will be the one debased, he will not suffer it passively. There is strength in facing fate unafraid.

The bird croaks. ꜱᴏ ɪᴛ ꜱʜᴀʟʟ ʙᴇ, it says, bending down, glossy, dark beak poised to its prize. There are no lights here, but Seiji could see, as now he sees impossible reflections cast by nothing skitter on the bird's beak, approaching, the darkness not flat but illuminated, glowing, all-encompassing.

* * *

Pain, first. It returns before himself, hitting him just a moment before his vision unblurs and focuses on the shadow curved over him with the sun blaring at its edges—Shuuichi, backlit. And he's still holding him up, gently, because of the knife in his back. 

Even with the pain, this is the most beautiful thing Seiji could have come back to.

He feels— closure. Physical. And it's nothing Shuuichi inspires; no, it's his heart resuming its beating, uncertainly, as the metal that pierced it through retracts, the muscle sewing itself together, made in reverse. But only the heart; the muscle and skin above it remain raw, singeing as the knife extricates itself. And then it is purged. 

Shuuichi is talking, in a manic rush; his mouth is opening and closing soundlessly in a dozen different shapes. He must not have heard the blade fall, and Seiji's strength has not yet returned to allow him to speak of or point to it. 

Next is Seiji's hearing: the silence becomes a single-pitch ringing, easing to an indistinct murmur, abruptly sharpening to the intensity with which Shuuichi is— not talking. Screaming. Screaming incoherencies to Seiji—he says his name, in between pleads to _Stay with me_ and _Help is coming_ and _You can't_ die _, not_ you _, not like this_ —and to his shiki. 

Seiji's eye strays to the side. The shiki detains the assailant—a young woman, staring numbly and open-mouthed at her hands, as if she cannot believe what she has done or that an unseen force keeps her from moving. Back to Shuuichi, who had not noticed his supposed corpse move.

But he definitely does now, with Seiji's arm creaking as he raises it, rustily, to his eyepatch. He presses a finger down to where the scarred eye should be, and his finger sinks and sinks into emptiness.

" _Seiji_?!" Shuuichi yells, shock where there was just desperation, pulling back to look at him. 

Between dried lips, Seiji coughs, "Unbelievable."

"You're—"

"Not dead," Seiji says, lowering his hand. Smirks, but the twinge accompanies one at his injured back as he tries to sit up; he winces and goes limp, but Shuuichi catches him, holds him tighter. He sighs, tired, and closes his eyes. "Like you wanted."

"Don't talk, and don't close your eyes," Shuuichi says, fingertips to Seiji's left cheekbone, like he means to open the good one for him but thinks better of it. Though he keeps his hand lightly to Seiji's face. As if expecting Seiji to bat it away. Or his own self, mercurial in how he presents himself to Seiji.

Seiji flutters his eyes open himself, studying Shuuichi for the closed-off book he's long been, now open, vulnerable, fear abating, relief taking its place. And he touches Shuuichi's cheek to see if he can read the pages at the end of his story. No such luck. It's only the present warmth, real, a person and not paper; that's Shuuichi underneath his fingertips, his breath stolen too.

"Just one," Seiji says, pulling down his hand.

"One what?"

"Eye." He hooks a finger under the eyepatch and Shuuichi pales as he sees— Seiji isn't sure _what_ he sees, because he has not yet seen his own changed face, but if he did not feel an eye, and he does not feel blood trickling from where one should be, then there is only exposed emptiness in its socket.

"How—" Shuuichi starts, but then he shakes his head. "No, I told you to stop talking. Tell me later. When you're okay." He says it with the heft of a promise, accentuated with incoming sirens.

Seiji intends to keep it. This is what he's come back for.

"The knife," Seiji says. "It's out of me."

Confused but taking his word for it, Shuuichi glances at the ground. His eyes widen and fly back to Seiji's.

"Later," he says, with effort. Sweat dampens his hair. He may be alive, but he is not free of the pain of near-death. "Put pressure on the wound."

Shuuichi removes his jacket one-handedly, his other hand always, always keeping Seiji steady. He lumps it together and presses it to Seiji's back, hands holding the jacket up as much as holding Seiji to him.

The sirens are an ambulance, trailed by a police car. The paramedics hop out, rushing to Seiji, Shuuichi yelling them over as if a bleeding man held precariously by another isn't evident enough, and Seiji twitches a fleeting smirk. It returns when he sees the widening in the paramedics' eyes at the knife fallen from his back, the blood it has spewed, and the life it hasn't claimed—not that they know it had, fleetingly. Nor should they.

Two policemen had stepped from the car, one going to where the assailant is muttering at her actions in between panicked pants. Shuuichi slightly tips his head aside in silent dismissal and his shiki swirls away, the breeze it causes unnoticed by the girl and policeman, in shock for similar reasons and unrelated to the unnatural they've unwittingly tangled themselves in.

Shuuichi wavers between the policeman and Seiji, who is loaded onto a stretcher.

Seiji tugs weakly on his sleeve and makes the decision for him with a look in the girl's direction. _Remember what I asked of you_ , he thinks, too tired to speak it, but Shuuichi gathers it. Tight-lipped, lingering for a heartbeat, he nods curtly at Seiji. Then he goes to the policeman to be the most charming witness, while Seiji is taken into the ambulance. At least one part of his plans has not been for nothing. 

But dismissing the changes he'd left to Nanase will be cumbersome if she has already moved them into place. And her reaction at seeing him alive might be worse than that. Not because she is among those who want him dead, but because no doubt she will snort and smirk at what has turned out to be histrionics.

What will be most cumbersome of all is convincing everyone else in the exorcism business that the Matoba clan's coveted eye has not been lost. 

A worry for later. He has defied fate to be alive, and if he breathes and thinks and beats warm blood, he can think of an answer. He is Matoba Seiji. He always can.

* * *

Seiji pats down the hospital bed sheets as his first visitor walks in.

"We'll have to get back the knife used to attack me," he tells the bed sheets, imagining a wrinkle like those he smooths down upon his own back, to match the jagged line across his right once-eye, displayed for Nanase to see. "It was one of—"

Looking up, he sees it is not her. 

"Hi," Shuuichi says, barely above the sound of the door closing. He takes a few steps to Seiji but maintains a respectable distance between them. "How are you feeling?"

Seiji blinks. "Freshly stabbed and resuscitated."

Shuuichi winces, as if it is his fault it had happened, but he recovers. "What was that you were saying about the knife?"

He might as well know— no, enough with the nonchalance. Shuuichi _needs_ to know. This is how Seiji will make amends, little by little.

"It belongs to one of my people," he says, and tells Shuuichi everything. Ah. Almost everything. He does not mention how Shuuichi himself is what has brought him back. That can be later. Eventually.

As he recounts nearly dying, Shuuichi's expression is a study in changes. "You gave up your _eye_?"

"Yes."

"But..." Shuuichi can't find the words.

Seiji understands his intent. "I can't lead my clan if I am dead, can I?" 

"Are you going to tell your clan? Is the youkai that wants your eye going to stop coming, or is it going to be angrier? Wait, will it want your _other_ eye?"

Seiji sighs, resting his head against the pillow. "One question at a time, please, Shuuichi-san."

Shuuichi's look turns curious—a remnant of the boy Seiji had known once, lost somewhere in the man he seldom crosses paths with now. 

Seiji is puzzled over the reason for it, and then realizes it's the name he'd called him, dusted off from its spoken disuse. He fixes a strand of his hair. "I'll tell Nanase, at the least. I don't know the answer to any of your other questions. I suppose we will have to wait until they happen to know, like anything else." 

"That's... unexpected. From you, anyway." Shuuichi pretends to be interested in the hospital room's excuse of a wall painting. "I thought you'd have a plan for this, too."

Seiji is quiet a moment before replying, with the most minimal voice to count for speaking, "I don't." 

Shuuichi goes still.

"I," Seiji continues on the verge of the inaudible, "did not want to die. I made my choice." He adds, louder, summoning a pale smirk, "The consequences were for after I was capable of handling them."

"But you— you really gave up your eye?"

"You saw for yourself it is missing."

"But why?" Shuuichi asks, and the confusion, the lack of understanding that Seiji could possibly want anything softer than power, cuts worse than the blade had. 

He looks down at his hands, the blanket whiter with just one eye to see it. And then he looks up. To Shuuichi's bespectacled eyes, blinding hospital lights casting rounded, white rectangles at their corners. "There are things I have left unfinished or broken," he says, "that I should fix within my lifetime." Still he speaks in evasions and implications. Changes are not immediate, he reflects.

But Shuuichi—used to reading archaic script and the spaces between Seiji's words—seems to interpret what he hadn't said correctly. He keeps his mouth impassive, but a glimmer crosses his eyes, his lids slightly raised. 

They do not nor have they ever spoken of where they went wrong, but they both know it is a festering part of what makes them who they are to one another. This is the closest to an acknowledgement or apology, that Seiji—prideful leader of a long line of exorcists—has ever said. Seiji had not thought it in him. But neither had he thought of death so closely. Experience changes perspective.

"Oh," Shuuichi ends up saying. "That's good." He's careful with his hope, cautious as he is with everything that makes it out of Seiji, but it sounds— odd. Like it's not what he wanted to say.

One last push, subtle as Seiji can make it, unable to be forthright so quickly. "You called me 'Seiji' earlier," he says. 

"You were bleeding to death on me! It slipped out!"

"That wasn't a reprimand." He deliberately folds his hands on his lap. "Did I not return the favor?"

The near-decade they have spent as strangers is condensed into those few seconds it takes Shuuichi to reply, "You did."

Seiji breathes in as if it is to be his last. 

There is pink on Shuuichi's face, in profile to Seiji. His eyes are to the far wall but see beyond it.

They are two versions of the same tale. Two perspectives, each believing themselves in the right. That will never change—what can is where their individual parallel paths next go. Continued distance or convergence? It depends on what the other half of this does. 

And Shuuichi says to the wall, "I was scared."

 _You weren't the one dying_ , Seiji thinks, on the cusp of quipping it, but though true, it would only shallowly cover as a response. Shuuichi has spent years trying to bury his heart, but instead of keeping it dead under his bones it overflows. He can witness monsters' deaths—instigate them, even—but no more than that. He can walk a different path from Seiji, decided years back, but he can't dismiss him as a person who breathes and thinks and feels and is tied irrevocably to himself.

"And I don't really mean because of the blood," Shuuichi continues. "If you had died, I would— I don't know what I would have done." He exhales abruptly. Is somehow able to look at him. "I wouldn't have wanted that to be how we ended."

There had never been anything between them but a _maybe_ that rotted off to a _never_. It's what Seiji had thought the rest of their lives would be suspended in.

Turns out it wasn't what he'd wanted. And neither, apparently, had Shuuichi. The 'we' he'd said, the only way possible of addressing the two of them, feels more personal than just the necessary pronoun. It's their old could-have-been, bloomed from the rot, offered anew.

Seiji seizes it. "Neither would I."

An acknowledgement in turn, the circuitous route of what Seiji cannot yet say completed with Shuuichi's aid, his understanding and complicity and equal inability to speak honestly when needed. Many exorcists would prefer to see Matoba Seiji dead, and many too disdain Natori Shuuichi's late and powerful entry after his clan's decay. But not Shuuichi to Seiji. Not Seiji to Shuuichi.

Part of Shuuichi's job is to know how to smile genuinely enough that the camera will flatter him, and generic enough that whoever views him will feel it is directed at them. It makes all of his smiles fake, then, and it seeps into his every day, because if those smiles are good for magazines they're good anywhere. 

What Shuuichi offers Seiji now is a tentative, tiny quirk of the lip, and it's the most genuine smile he's seen on him. So it's also the most affecting—despite its subtle presence, it's a potentiality. A hope.

It lifts a weight off Seiji that with it raises the corners of his mouth as slightly as Shuuichi's, but it is there, buoyant, where once it was flat falsities.

His honesty, wordless as it may be, catches Shuuichi off-guard; he blinks rapidly, eyes here and there, anywhere that isn't Seiji. 

Seiji exhales amusement and inhales pensiveness as he places a tentative hand below his right eye, where the lightning-root of the scar burns out. He traces its path upward, a habit he has, knowing what bumps he is supposed to feel, until he reaches his eye itself. Ghosting over lashes, thin, and an emptiness unaware a finger hovers in front. He sees not black but nothing, no better than trying to see from his palms. 

There goes a legacy, for selfish reasons. And his shame of it does not exist. If he keeps this air when he tells the clan, they will accept it, even if in their hearts they curse him. He is not related to many of them by blood, but that they have spilled it for him all the same is a kind of kinship. It had been disrespectful to doubt them.

And that it was not his sister behind things is a relief he does not want to acknowledge. Their blood is real, but it has gone bad, irreparably. For what she has dedicated herself to, antithesis to him, he should hate her.

But he's found the extremes of love and hate are not as set in his heart as he was taught they should be. 

So the relief creeps in, noticed then ignored, and Seiji pretends the small satisfaction of peace is from his acceptance of his situation and what may come.

And when Nanase strides in without warning, Shuuichi yelps, swinging to the door as if to explain himself being anything but distant to Seiji. 

"You didn't knock," Seiji tells her, hiding his smile, though it had wanted to widen at Shuuichi's reaction.

"Sorry," she says, not sounding like it, "but this was urgent, I'd say." She eyes him levelly, betraying no emotion, as ever. "I'm glad you're alright," she says, and that, almost imperceptibly, does have sincerity at its core. She looks at Shuuichi. "I appreciate the call." 

Shuuichi nods slowly. He looks between Nanase and Seiji. "Um, should I leave?"

"Yes," Nanase says, at the same time Seiji says, "No."

She curiously eyes Seiji, who accepts her amused judgment with a shrug. "I had informed him of the same as you. I'm sure you've investigated this while I was out, and Shuuichi-san deserves to hear what you have to say as well."

At Shuuichi's name, her smirk is unmistakable; even Shuuichi, his ears coloring, can parse the reason for it. "Fine," she says, then addresses Seiji. "I was told you were stabbed. We were able to see the knife, and I recognized it immediately. It's one of our people's."

"I know."

She raises a quizzical eyebrow. 

He waves a hand. "Finish your report, then I will give you mine."

"It's Sano's knife. One of our newer recruits. He went with us to the exorcism out in the countryside and promptly lost his knife, which he didn't tell us until it was too late. It's a possessed knife. Offers impossible deals with youkai and kills them when they don't meet them." She peers at him over her glasses, lingering briefly on the hole where his right eye should be. "But it seems you found that out."

He closes the eye. It makes no difference in what he sees, and the sensation of feeling himself shut out nothing is jarring. "It wasn't impossible," he says. "Just difficult."

"At any rate, we've kicked him out for his incompetence. And we're keeping the knife."

"The surgeons let you do that?" Shuuichi asks.

She looks at him. "With sufficient force and money, anything's doable." Back to Seiji. "Where it gets complicated is the girl who attacked you. She was stalking Natori here."

Shuuichi pales. "That was her?" He looks at Seiji. "You almost died because of me?"

"There is no use fretting about it," Seiji says. Though he knows it won't have any effect on Shuuichi, it's the truth of what he feels. "What's done is done. Hypotheticals that never came to be are worthless, particularly when they can be variably and endlessly interpreted." He flicks a finger. "I could have died for allowing Sano-san into my clan." Another finger. "Or for ever allowing anyone outside the Matoba to be part of the clan." A third. "Or because of the craftsman who made the knife." He rests his hand on his lap. "There are countless things to blame and not enough fingers to point. It's useless to argue," he adds, noting Shuuichi is on the verge of saying something. "If I hadn't gone to you when I believed my clan would wrong me, she would have found me somehow. It was fated."

Shuuichi closes his mouth.

Seiji turns to Nanase. "Did the knife possess the girl, or did she already harbor murderous intent?"

"Seems to be the former. The police have her and she's been hysterical. Too much to be some attempt at pity, in my opinion. She's been questioned and said her family owns the inn we stayed at. She found the knife in Sano's room, grabbed it to return it, but she's not gifted and the knife is powerful—I held it myself—and it possessed her. But the police won't believe she had no control over her actions." She shrugs. "They'll just see a stalker who acted in an ultimatum. She'll most likely be tried as an adult and be imprisoned. We have a witness and the would-be victim to testify she did what she did."

"But," Shuuichi says, confliction obvious with just a single word, "you said you can do anything with force and money. You could... waive things for her, right? She did something horrible, but it wasn't her. She doesn't deserve that. She's just a misguided kid."

Nanase has kept her gaze steely on Seiji's. "What do _you_ want?" she asks him.

Of all of Seiji's enemies, none take the shape of a teenage girl. He has long entertained meting out justice to the people who would wrong him, but they are all exorcists, men and women grown, as merciless and ruthless as him in their duty. Had it been one of them behind his near-death, he would have known what to do with them; he would have delighted in righteous revenge.

When he thinks of doing the same to this girl, he feels nothing. He doesn't know her; he has no investment in her punishment. It could go either way and he would not care.

The one who does care is Shuuichi. That, in itself, is enough to guide him to the answer.

"Do what you must to help her," Seiji says, purposefully vague. Force and money indeed. "See she does not bother Shuuichi-san anymore." He makes himself keep looking at Nanase instead of the corner of his eye, where Shuuichi relaxes.

"Understood." She crosses her arms. "So, what happened on your end?"

Where Shuuichi openly wore his reaction to what had happened to him, Nanase moves not a muscle but for the occasional blink, calm and automatic. For that, Seiji is thankful. 

"No one else in the clan is to know I have relinquished my eye," he finishes. "Not yet. I want to see how the youkai will react—if it comes."

Nanase hums. "We'll need to plan for all possibilities. Including that the clan is informed and someone tattles to our enemies." She glances at Shuuichi and not surreptitiously.

"Of course I'm keeping this private!" Shuuichi says. "Do you think that little of me, Nanase-san?"

She smirks.

Seiji's once-eye is beginning to cramp from consciously keeping it closed. He raises a hand to it as if it'll suppress the pain. "You didn't happen to recover my eyepatch as well, Nanase, did you?"

She shakes her head.

But Shuuichi straightens. "Oh, I— I can help. Maybe." He puts a hand inside his jacket, Seiji noting it's rusted with his dried blood from where he'd bunched it to his wounded back. Shuuichi pulls out a long strip of paper, inked by hand—there are tiny droplets around the purposeful design, patched thinly in places where the brush's ink did not seep. He lays it between his hands. 

It is an attempt at Seiji's eyepatch.

"I couldn't remember how it looked, exactly," Shuuichi admits, "since your hair covered most of it. I did this on my paper and I borrowed from hindrance symbols, too, so it should work. But probably not like your actual eyepatch." He steps closer to Seiji, nervously offering it. "Your other one was ruined, and I didn't know what to do while I waited for you to wake up, so..."

"It's crudely made," is the first thing Seiji says, even as he feels another weight come off him, leaving a pleasant but strange warmth in its place.

Shuuichi colors. "Sorry for not keeping eyepatch-making materials with me or a perfect memory of your design!" He starts to draw back but Seiji's hand, nimble as a hare, closes around his wrist.

Just as quickly, he pulls back, returning it neatly to his lap. He pauses to compose himself. "I'll take it."

"Alright," Shuuichi quietly says. For a moment he doesn't move; then, all at once, he presses the eyepatch onto Seiji's bedside and steps back, further than before.

Another pause. A stern examination of the distance. "Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"If we're good here," Nanase says, and Shuuichi startles, while Seiji's hands themselves twitch, having forgotten like Shuuichi that she was here, "I'll leave to take care of things."

"Can't I leave yet? I'm tired, but I'm fine."

"You were stabbed, and no doctor is going to know the supernatural was involved. You're stuck here. Enjoy your bedrest. Good seeing you, Natori," she says, throwing a smile like a knife over her shoulder as she leaves. 

"Isn't she formidable?" Seiji says once she's gone, turning to Shuuichi, who idly rubs his arm.

"Scary, you mean."

He lets out a small laugh. "I had named her clan head. Were I gone, it would have been her you'd dealt with."

"That makes sense, I guess, since she's your right-hand woman, but would your clan have accepted her as leader? She also isn't a Matoba."

"She was the best option. Is, rather. I will not be ridding myself of the will I wrote, and while I think there are some revisions I could do, that won't change."

There is a chair by the window, gone unused and unnoticed despite the slab of dusty light it is bathed by, that Shuuichi now approaches and drags, its metal feet scraping the floor. He makes a face and apologizes as he moves the chair somewhat close to Seiji—not right at his bedside, but near enough a conversation won't be stilted. He sits carefully on it.

Seiji, realizing he'd watched, grabs the eyepatch in one swooping motion, pretending he hadn't spent several seconds looking at Shuuichi. He parts his hair—dry and dull; he will need to pamper it once he returns to the manor—but in his post-surgery grog, it slides onto his way as he tries to tie the eyepatch on.

Shuuichi's hand, light at his scalp, pins the hair in place. Seiji hadn't heard him move.

"Is this fine?" Shuuichi asks, with what sounds like shyness, but it is undeniable when he adds, "Seiji?"

Seiji lets his name fill his ears, savoring it for a moment, conscious now of what it means. Then he gives a small nod, Shuuichi's hand rising and falling with the motion. He ties the eyepatch on with some difficulty, a maneuver he could usually perform as elegantly as his archery, but he tells himself it's the drugs coursing through his blood that stutter his fingers. "Thank you," he says when he has it done. The paper is odd on his skin. Creamy, not a single fiber out of place to tickle him, and so light.

Shuuichi withdraws his hand. Sits back down—this Seiji hears happen, though he looks too. To see what Shuuichi has made of this.

Shuuichi is looking at his hand. But he catches Seiji's eye on his, and now it's him who pretends he hadn't wondered at his own hand. "Do you think that the bird would have taken your hair?" he asks. "I mean, you grew it out exactly because of youkai."

Without a tie, his hair falls limply, obstructively. He begins to braid it. "It wouldn't have taken it."

And Shuuichi watches his fingers move. Says, "You didn't even need to think about it?"

"The youkai asked me for something I valued more than my life. Between my hair grown just to save me, or the eye my family has borne because of and for our power, it is obvious what the youkai coveted." He undoes the section of the braid he'd just done; strands had come loose. Tries again. "It resembled a crow; they like things of worth. It was reasonably intelligent and knew of me. I think it would not have spared me if I'd tried to barter with my hair. Hair grows back. An eye that is the cause and consequence of who the Matoba are will not."

"You really wanted to come back, huh." Stated, softly, not asked.

"After you let me read the Natori clan's knowledge," Seiji drawls, "I couldn't take it with me to the grave when it would benefit my clan."

Shuuichi smiles, picking up the shallowness with which that was spoken. Accepting what he had shared and what will happen because of it.

Seiji has come to the end of his hair. Briefly he thinks the braid will hold without needing to be tied, but when he lets his fingers go, his hair begins to unwind. He pinches it.

The sound of someone getting up, walking. The presence of someone once known and lost returned to his side; a hand outheld, twine curled on its lined palm.

"Here," Shuuichi says. 

Seiji stares at him.

Shuuichi's other hand runs bashfully through his hair. "It's also from my exorcism tools."

"That's fine." He takes it, fingers brushing Shuuichi's palm, marring them with no writing he knows, but his intent is so thick in his thoughts he thinks Shuuichi can glean this touch-language.

All Shuuichi does is return to his seat. He stops in front of it. Moves it closer to Seiji's bedside.

Seiji ties the twine around his hair. It is longer than needed, and its ends curl up like smiles.

From the window streams in light, strong. 

He frowns. "What time is it?"

"Hmm? Oh. A little past three."

"How long was I out after being stabbed?"

"A minute, I think."

Within the youkai's realm it had felt like far longer. 

"But," Shuuichi adds, quietly, "you did die. I checked your heartbeat and breathing, and your eye was— lifeless. Unseeing. The fortune didn't lie."

Seiji examines the ends of his hair. "It wouldn't have been divination if it had been wrong, would it?"

"Well... yeah." He pauses. "Are you ever going to divine again? Obviously you have the skill."

"And look where it got me. Unable to trust in anything for the ambiguity it foretold. Focusing on only dying with dignity, ignoring everything else I could do." He tucks his braid back. "It was more trouble than it was worth."

"I guess you'll be paying more attention to superstitions," Shuuichi says, with a lopsided smile. And, though unusual on him, it befits him.

"I will admit it was foolish of me to forget to tread with caution in what exists adjacent to my duty." He exhales, feeling the soundless stream on his folded arms. "It never ends, does it."

"No. But it's what we chose."

He switches which of his hands rests on top of the other. "That we did."

The seconds fill in with silence. 

Shuuichi points to the door. "Should I... be going?"

"No," Seiji says—not too soon, not too late. He lightly clears his throat. "If you wish, Shuuichi-san, you may stay."

A smile fleetingly crosses Shuuichi's face, but the tension that leaves him is gone for good. "Okay," he says, and settles back on the chair. He twines his hands together. Taps his thumbs to each other. "I don't really know what else to talk about."

"You don't need to do away with silence. Often, it alone suffices."

"But I don't need to be here for it to be quiet."

"No, but you will need to be here for when I have something to say."

He crosses a leg over the other, leans back against the chair. Making himself at home. Like the smile he dons. "And when will that be?"

He doesn't know. There is plenty to be said, but he cannot delve immediately into it. "Soon," he says, because it's the most honest answer he has.

"That's kind of vague."

"Well," he says, reclining onto the pillow at his back, upping Shuuichi's smile with one sharper, "I suppose you will have to stay to know."

Shuuichi tilts his head to him. "I suppose I will."

Tiredness is seeping into Seiji, unable to be held back anymore. The day has been long and bloody and solemn. There are things to do—slowly, as a river changes its course—but for now, he deserves rest.

He flutters his eyes close, and the peach-colored darkness behind his good one is familiar. What isn't is what he says, and not to an empty room: "Wait for me, won't you, Shuuichi-san?"

"I'll wait, Seiji," is the quiet response.

 _I won't be long_ , he thinks, mouth softening to a memory of a smile, and he sleeps.

**Author's Note:**

> [breaking a geta](https://www.japan-zone.com/omnibus/superstition2.shtml), [stepping on the border of a tatami mat](https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/3814/), [sleeping north](https://www.fluentu.com/blog/japanese/japanese-superstitions/), [seeing spiders at night](https://taiken.co/single/japanese-superstitions-that-you-should-know/), [hearing crows](https://livejapan.com/en/article-a0001290/), and [the number four](https://omniglot.com/language/numbers/japanese.htm) are jpn superstitions that mean nothing good


End file.
